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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 65:2 (2019) ► pp.286–315

Teaching English-Chinese textual translation strategies

A topic-chain approach

| Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

The topic-chain is a typical characteristic used to distinguish Chinese discourse from other languages, such as English. By studying how to make use of the topic-chain, one learns how to decipher English into natural and idiomatic Chinese translation. The idea of using topic-chains to explore English-Chinese (E-C) textual translation is relatively new to translation studies. As such, this paper provides a detailed account of cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese, with regard to the topic-chain, as well as the differences between the topic-chain model and the approach of thematic progression theory. This study, based on contrastive analysis, constructs a model consisting of specific procedures that are simple and easy to use, thereby making English-Chinese textual translation a more manageable process. Use of topic-chain strategies will promote the efficiency and quality of E-C translation, and allow for Chinese translated text to be more idiomatic. This paper provides an overview of effective textual translation strategies that are useful both for translators and the field of translation studies as a whole. It addresses how to teach translation effectively to students, providing practical theory and practice for pedagogical instruction. Meanwhile, an experiment conducted provides the evidence that topic-chain for pedagogical instruction is significantly valid. The pedagogical design of these strategies emphasizes the training of students’ textual awareness and targets language-sensitive awareness. It is assumed that didactics can help students gain bilingual competence and strengthen their core transfer competence. This study, therefore, is significant not only in exploring the benefits and uses of textual translation studies, but has practical value when applied directly to translation learning and teaching.

Keywords: the topic chain, optimisation of topic, cognitive order, effective textual translation strategies, pedagogical instructions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief review of English-Chinese textual translation
    • 2.1Textual translation in other languages
    • 2.2English-Chinese textual translation
  • 3.The topic chain in Chinese
    • 3.1The concept of the topic chain
    • 3.2Combining comment clauses
    • 3.3Double-nominal construction
  • 4.Strategies and models of topic chains for E-C textual translation
    • 4.1Identifying a topic for the Chinese topic chain
    • 4.2Strategies to arrange comment clauses within the topic-chain
      • 4.2.1Temporal consequence
      • 4.2.2Spatial order
      • 4.2.3Static before dynamic
      • 4.2.4Four-character expressions and parallelism
    • 4.3The application model
  • 5.Pedagogical instruction
    • 5.1Tutorial on the E-C translation application of topic-chain
    • 5.2Experimental evidence
    • 5.3Topic-chain awareness and translation competence
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00097.sun
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