The Institute for Chinese Studies presents "The Centenary of the May Fourth Movement" Lecture Series:
Xin Shang
Professor, College of Foreign Languages
Shanghai Maritime University
Title: Problems in Applying Contrastive Analysis to Translation and Ways Out: A Perspective from Chinese and English in Contrast
Flyer: Xin Shang Flyer
Abstract: The failure of previous Contrastive Analysis-based translation studies to provide a solid and applicable procedure to translation processes was largely responsible for the decline of CA in the field of translation studies. In this talk, I first elaborate on the significance of CA in translation studies, then identify the problems in previous CA-based approaches to translation studies, and finally, by incorporating linguistic typology and corpus-based translation technique into CA, I propose an alternative model of CA-based integrated scientific translation approach, which is assumed to be the first and fundamental layer of translation processes. By way of illustrating the working mechanism of the proposed approach and the nature of the translation process in the linguistic paradigm, I discuss a couple of case studies in Chinese-English translation.
Bio: Xin Shang (Ph. D. East China Normal University, 2004) is Professor of Linguistics at Shanghai Maritime University. His research interests include semantics, contrastive linguistics and CA-based translation studies. He has published 40 scholarly articles and two books, one of which, titled A Typological Study of English and Chinese Tense-Aspect and Translation Strategies (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2014), won the 13th Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Outstanding Book Award in 2016. He has also held offices in several professional societies over the past two decades.
Free and Open to the Public
This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.
