Juan Cobo’s Map of the Pacific World (1593)

Juan Cobo (1546/47–1592) was a Dominican priest who devoted most of his efforts in the Philippines to proselytizing the resident Chinese population of Manila and its environs. This map of the Pacific world from China to Mexico appears in a translation of an influential piece of Counter- Reformation apologetics that Cobo prepared with the help, most likely, of unnamed Chinese collaborators, and that he had published in Manila in 1593 for the benefit of Chinese prospects for Christian conversion. It is the first European-style map created for a Chinese reader. Timothy Brook provides an English translation of the map’s Chinese inscriptions, while Ricardo Padrón analyzes the map’s rhetorical position.

Modern Russian female prose in Chinese Russian studies

Chinese literary scholars studying Russian literature come to a conclusion by the end of the twentieth century that its history has many “white spots.” Thus, efforts are made to fill the existing lacunas, and one of them is the modern Russian female prose. The paper analyzes the Chinese reader’s receptive attitudes determining the interpretation and evaluation of the works of Russian women-writers. One reason for the interest in Russian female literature is the “women’s issue” relevance in China. “Soft” Chinese feminism is a receptive context defining the text interpretation. In the Russian literature scholars’ works, it is manifested in the desire to see harmonious intersexual relations in the Russian women-writers’ prose, in a high assessment of a “holy” type in the character sphere. The Chinese reader highly appreciates overcoming the male-female opposition, searching for forms of dialogue, and imagining a harmonious family. Continuity is a relevant cultural receptive attitude of the Chinese reader, the link with tradition being a significant criterion for evaluating a phenomenon. Chinese scholars note that female literature continues the realistic tradition of telling about the social “bottom” and “little man,” thereby provoking the reader’s interest. Russian female prose is the “young” object in Chinese Russian studies. The Russian philology specialists are looking for linguistic “connectors,” e. g. themes and a typology of heroes, to see the phenomenon as a whole. Chinese specialists focus on the themes of survival, love, and family. The hero typology includes such types as the “new Amazons,” playing women, saints.

The use of situation-bound utterances in Chinese foreign language textbooks

This article examines the use of situation-bound utterances (qíngjìng zhuānyòngyǔ 情境专用语) in five mainstream Chinese foreign language textbooks in order to survey, categorize, and discuss their use therein. Kecskes (2000a. A cognitive-pragmatic approach to situation-bound utterances. Journal of Pragmatics 32(5). 605–625) defined Situation-bound utterances (hereafter SBUs) as “highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized communicative situations” (2000a: 606). SBUs are prevalent in Modern Chinese and in several ways represent Chinese culture. Many Chinese foreign language textbooks, however, underestimate the importance of SBUs. Based on information culled from five textbooks (Integrated Chinese 中文听说读写, First Step 中文起步, Basic Spoken Chinese 基础中文：听与说, Practical Audio-Visual Chinese 实用视听华语, and New Practical Chinese Reader 新实用汉语) a Chinese SBUs database has been generated. One hundred seventy-eight Chinese SBUs are identified, and they are categorized into ten speech act categories. Among these, the three most common speech acts are: (1) greetings/daily conversation, (2) polite request, and (3) inquiry. These speech acts represent and reflect the concept and practice of politeness in Chinese culture. Basic Spoken Chinese provides the most detailed and clearest explanations of SBUs, and explains the most appropriate contexts for use of SBUs. As for repeated use of SBUs, both Basic Spoken Chinese and Integrated Chinese outperformed the other textbooks. None of the textbooks examined, however, adequately explain the use and importance of SBUs in Modern Chinese. The purpose of this study is to fill this lacuna.

Ideological positioning in news translation

This article investigates the Chinese translations of several English news reports on China’s human rights issue carried in Reference News, a Chinese authoritative state-run newspaper devoted to translating foreign reports for the Chinese reader, and aims to establish how evaluative resources are resorted to by the translators to facilitate ideologically different positioning in presenting events and identifying participants in the translated news. The translations are compared with their English source texts using Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) as the micro analytical framework and Fairclough’s (1995a, 1995b) three-dimension model of Critical Discourse Analysis as the explanatory framework.