The aim of this article is to contribute to the discourse by clarifying the extent to which complex intersemiotic action can still be regarded as translation. This will be shown by two of its major... Show More

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discourse by clarifying the extent to which complex intersemiotic action can still be regarded as translation. This will be shown by two of its major representatives (i.e., localization and [global] adaptation), both of which constitute contested issues in translation studies research with regard to their conceptual belonging. Functional translation theory will be employed to achieve this aim. Employing functional translation theory will show that the decisive criterion for the conceptual affiliation of any intersemiotic action to translation is whether or not it constitutes a predominantly language-based text-to-text transfer. Finally, given its successful implementation, this paper proposes functionalist skopos theory as one possible interdisciplinary methodological tool for intersemiotic action that is not only useful for translation studies but could also be useful, if accordingly adapted, for other neighboring disciplines, such as, for example, adaptation studies.

This empirical study takes a cognitive perspective and examines the translation of metaphors in speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping as collected in the first volume of the book The Governance... Show More

This empirical study takes a cognitive perspective and examines the translation of metaphors in speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping as collected in the first volume of the book The Governance of China published in 2014. The study draws upon Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory and Newmark's categories of translation procedure for metaphors. The researchers' data analysis has shown that (1) four out of the eight existing translation procedures for metaphors are employed in translating Xi's metaphors, and (2) while the use of one translation procedure reflects similar cognitive mapping conditions between the source and the target culture, the use of the other procedures does not always correlate with the similarities or differences in cognitive mappings between the two cultures in question. The research raises new inquiries regarding metaphor translation, and the researchers accordingly discuss the implications of their findings for metaphor translation pedagogy and future translation studies.

As one of the most common language phenomena in bilingual settings, code-switching has been studied widely to explore its nature and features. In the current study, the author set out to explore the... Show More

As one of the most common language phenomena in bilingual settings, code-switching has been studied widely to explore its nature and features. In the current study, the author set out to explore the effect of syntactic alignment on Chinese-English bilinguals' code-switched sentence production using a picture-describing task with a structural priming paradigm. The structural priming paradigm has been frequently used to explore the mechanisms of sentence production. The effect of syntactic alignment was observed, indicating Chinese-English bilinguals were inclined to produce code-switched sentences with the same syntactic structure between Chinese and English. The findings provide empirical evidence not only supporting structural priming during bilingual code-switched sentence production, but also extending the interactive alignment model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) to interpret code-switching during bilingual sentence production. Implications for code-switching and bilingual sentence processing are discussed.

The significance of Patterson's work Understanding Metaphor Through Corpora: A Case Study of Metaphors in Nineteenth Century Writing is that only through corpus linguistics have we been able to... Show More

The significance of Patterson's work Understanding Metaphor Through Corpora: A Case Study of Metaphors in Nineteenth Century Writing is that only through corpus linguistics have we been able to apply real empirical evidence to our arguments of what metaphor is. By demonstrating that metaphor is supposed to be approached from a linguistic perspective along with a psycholinguistic one, Patterson succeeds in drawing readers' attention to the efficacy and the benefits of combining corpus linguistic methodology with the theory of lexical priming. Thus, the volume is an essential reader for students and researchers in corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, lexicography, semantics, and pragmatics.