Linguistics Culture Translation

AY2025/2026 Semester 1

This course not only considers differences between Chinese and English in terms of semantics, rhetoric and pragmatics but also provides students with a basic understanding of the cognitive and epistemic issues involved in cross-cultural encounters and dialogues, introducing students to the larger cultural forces at work in translation such as the ideology, poetics and patronage of both the source and target cultures and investigating a variety of bumps and barriers faced by the translator due to differences in customs, manners, imagination, values and beliefs underlying the two cultures under study. Students will learn to examine translation issues from an analytical linguistic point of view and be familiar with the resources that lead to effective and serviceable translation, and will be helped to develop critical awareness of cultural problems which pose challenges to translation when translating texts between Chinese and English.