Promoting discipline of translation
How can minority writers within China assert their own linguistic individualism whilst also writing in Chinese? Ethnic minority works which deal with local culture, including customs, rituals and traditional legends, can generally be divided into two groups: writing in standard Chinese, and works that are composed in native scripts.
Ethnography is one of the most commonly used research methodologies in the social sciences. It has also long been regarded as ‘the translation of cultures’ (Asad 1986). In this seminar, I shall discuss how ethnography can be used in TS research.
As the demand for professional translation and related services grows in our ever more interconnected world, universities are coming under pressure from different quarters to respond effectively. In this seminar, I shall outline a systematic approach to curricular design to take into account not only the requirements of the language service industry and the market, but also those of other essential stakeholders, in an attempt to offer a roadmap for localized and contextualized curricular design.
During the early Qing dynasty (17-18th century), the Jesuit Figurists, including Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Foucquet, and Joseph de Prémare, espoused the view that symbols, figures, numbers, terms, and Chinese characters embedded in the Chinese classics proved that the Chinese people had believed in the God of Christianity since antiquity.
In recent years，both Chinese literature and culture are "going global", which initiated a new wave of "Introduction of Chinese Learning to the West". In the present "going global" process, it is Chinese literature and culture that attracted world attention rather than Chinese academic scholarships.
Minority Translation Studies (MTS), the study of translation to and from minority languages, evolved out of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) in the 1980s, but nobody has proposed Moribund Translation Studies, the study of translation to and from moribund languages, i.e., languages with few native speakers, especially young native speakers.
Internet and big data have put the spur on the development of today’s world at an unprecedented pace. The translation industry which traditionally relied mostly on the production of individual translators is now gradually being replaced by the well-organized modern translation teams operating under the present day production logistics.
The decision made by WWII Allied powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France) to prosecute expeditiously Nazi suspected criminals required the use of a simultaneous interpreting system which had been patented by IBM after successful trials at the International Labour Office in Geneva in the late 1920s.
Since he was first introduced to Chinese readers in 1856, in a book titled《大英國誌》(The History of England), Shakespeare has gained more and more popularity in the Chinese speaking world, until he becomes a household name. That popularity is achieved thanks to translation and transformation of his works in various forms.
Disciplinary discourses at the interface between translation studies and activism have been traditionally dominated by 'structuralist' perspectives (Pérez-González 2010). Activist translation has therefore tended to be conceptualised as a set of counter-hegemonic practices of mediation invariably associated with written texts, and undertaken by aggrieved constituencies clustered around essentialist categories of identity politics.
