Translation Seminar Series

This talk will look at literary illustration as intersemiotic translation, as the "interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems" (Roman Jakobson). Using as examples illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, it will ask, amongst other things, how beyond representing scenes and characters, illustrators have "translated" into their own sign system literary elements which have no immediate visual equivalent, such as the verbal nonsense games that characterise Carroll's novel.

Tibetan director and fiction writer Pema Tseden's films and fictions from The Silent Holy Stones 《靜靜的嘛呢石》to Tharlo 《塔洛》are acclaimed by scholars and critics to be rare moments which individuate Tibetan characters, rather than conceiving of the Tibetan people en masse as the ethnic and cultural Other of China.

This highly illustrated talk explores food in performance and food as performing art; the performative in cookery, its staging in the kitchen and at the table; exploring piquant analogies and correlations; the theatricality of food and food as a model for theatre, multisensory, processual and communal.

This seminar will focus on a central argument on the task of the translator as a diplomat, by drawing upon my ongoing experience as the series editor and chief translator of the Intellect China Library, a book series that publishes English translation of the latest Chinese scholarship of art and culture.

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.