Translation Universals of Discourse Markers in Russian-to-Chinese Academic Texts: A Corpus-based Approach

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhanhao Jiang ◽  
Yuan Tao

SummaryThe existing research on translational universals (TUs) has so far been confined to limited language pairs such as English-German, English-French, Hungarian-English, Polish-English, English-Chinese, and Scandinavian languages with English being the focus. If the “translationese” or features of translational language that have been uncovered on the basis of translational English are to be generalized as translational universals, it is necessary that we should find proof or evidence from non-European languages or two typologically different languages such as Russian and Chinese. This paper, on the basis of self-compiled parallel Russian-Chinese corpora and comparable non-translational Chinese corpora of academic texts for humanities and social sciences, explores potential features of translational Chinese by taking translation of discourse markers (DMs) as an example. Through statistics and observation, this research concludes with four tentative translation universals: simplification, implicitation, strengthening and normalization among the translational Chinese of Russian DMs. Underlying reasons may lie in both typological differences between two languages and translators’ choice of either target texts (TT) convention or source texts (ST) convention.

Author(s):  
V. P. Zakharov

The monograph is devoted to the descriptive analysis of the translation of scientific texts from Russian into Chinese based on corpus linguistics methods. The norms of translation, the issues of specificity and universality, as well as the influence of the characteristics of the source text on the translation text are discussed, in other words, the set of factors that influence the translation is investigated.


Author(s):  
Jakob Lenardič ◽  
Darja Fišer

This paper first presents a comparative analysis of modal adverbs in doctoral theses in the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and in natural and technical sciences on the other from the 1.7-billion-token corpus of Slovenian academic texts KAS (Erjavec et al., 2019a). Using a randomized concordance analysis, we observe the epistemic and non-epistemic usage of the modal adverbs and show that epistemic adverbs are more characteristic of the humanities and social sciences theses. We also show that the non-epistemic dispositional meaning of possibility, which is most commonly used in natural and technical sciences theses, is not used as a hedging device. In the second part of the paper we compare the usage of a selected set of modals in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral theses in order to chart how researchers’ approach to stance-taking changes at different proficiency levels in academic writing, showing that the observed increase in hedging devices in doctoral theses seems to be less a function of an increased proficiency level in academic writing as such and more the result of conceptual differences between undergraduate and postgraduate theses, only the latter of which are original research contributions with extensive discussion of the results.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 256-261
Author(s):  
Zaka Rauf ◽  
MUSA YUSUF

Attempts of undue separation of the philosophy of education and curriculum theory and development in the teaching of systematic functional education have been seriously criticized. This has been so because it is not in the best interest in the teaching of an intelligent and national curriculum which forms the bedrock to the development of a truly vibrant educational system in Nigeria. This paper, therefore, is an attempt to investigate the relevance of the philosophy of education to the development of an intelligent curriculum which is imperative to the teaching of functional education in the technical, the sciences, the humanities and social sciences towards the revitalization of the Nigerian educational sector. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (11) ◽  
pp. 144-153
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Zapesotsky

Book Review: P.P. Tolochko. Ukraine between Russia and the West: Historical and Nonfiction Essays. Saint Petersburg: Saint Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018. - 592 pp. ISBN 978-5-7621-0973-4This author discusses the problem of scientific objectivity and reviews a book written by the medievalist-historian P.P. Tolochko, full member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU), honorable director of the NASU Institute of Archaeology. The book was published by the Saint Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences in the autumn of 2018. The book presents a collection of articles and reports devoted to processes in Ukraine and, first of all, in Ukrainian historical science, which, at the moment, is experiencing an era of serious reformation of its interpretative models. The author of the book shows that these models are being reformed to suit the requirements of the new ideology, with an obvious disregard for the conduct of objective scientific research. In this regard, the problem of objectivity of scientific research becomes the subject of this review because the requirement of objectivity can be viewed not only as a methodological requirement but also as a moral and political position, opposing the rigor of scientific research to the impact of ideological, political and moral systems and judgments. It is concluded that in this sense the position of P.P. Tolochko can be considered as the act of profound ethical choice.


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