Terminology Translation in Chinese Contexts: Theory and Practice investigates the theory and practice of terminology translation, terminology management, and scholarship within the distinctive milieu of Chinese and explores the complex relationship between terminology translation (micro level) and terminology management (macro level). This book outlines the contemporary challenges of terminology translation and terminology management within Chinese contexts in specialized fields including law, the arts, religion, Chinese medicine, and food products. The volume also examines how the development and application of new technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence have brought about major changes in the language service industry. Technology such as machine translation and computer-assisted translation has spawned new challenges in terminology management practices and has facilitated their evolution in contexts of ever greater internationalization and globalization. This book recontextualizes terminology translation and terminology management with a special focus on English–Chinese translation. It is hoped that the volume will enable and enhance dialogue between Chinese and Western scholars and professionals in the field. All chapters have been written by specialists in the different subfields and have been peer-reviewed by the editors.

A Deaf Take on Non-Equivalence in Written Chinese Translation examines the issue of lexical non-equivalence between written Chinese and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) translation, describing its theoretical and practical implications. This research foregrounds the semiotic resources in the Deaf community of Hong Kong by analyzing translation strategies exhibited by Deaf Hongkongers when they were invited to translate written Chinese passages with specialized and culturally specific concepts in a monologic setting. With discourse analysis as a framework, the major findings of this research were that: (1) a taxonomy of strategies featured depiction, manual representations of Chinese characters and visual metonymy, writing and mouthing; (2) employment of multisemiotic and multimodal resources gave intended viewers access to different facets of meaning; and (3) repeated renditions of the same concepts gave rise to condensed, abbreviated occasionalisms. Observations from this research serve as a point of reference for interpreting scholars, practitioners and students as well as policymakers who formulate interpretation service provision and assessment.

Christianity in China has a history dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), when Allopen—the first Nestorian missionary—arrived there in 635. In the late sixteenth century, Matteo Ricci together with other Jesuit missionaries commenced the Catholic missions to China. Protestant Christianity in China began with Robert Morrison, of London Missionary Society, who first set foot in Canton in 1807. Over the centuries, the Western missionaries and Chinese believers were engaged in the enterprise of the translation, publication, and distribution of a large corpus of Christian literature in Chinese. While the extensive distribution of Chinese publications facilitated the propagation of Christianity, the Christian messages have been subtly re-presented, re-appropriated, and transformed by these works of Chinese Christian literature. This Special Issue entitled “Christian Literature in Chinese Contexts” examines the multifarious dimensions of the production, translation, circulation, and reception of Christian literature (with “Christian” and “literature” in their broadest sense) against the cultural and sociopolitical contexts from the Tang period to modern China. The eight articles in this volume cover a variety of intriguing topics, including the literary/translation endeavors of Western missionaries in Chinese, the indigenous works of the Chinese Christians, the interaction between the Christian and Chinese literary traditions, Chinese reception of the Bible, and numerous other relevant concepts.

Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese explores the choices in poetry translation in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and illustrates the ways in which readers can achieve a deeper understanding of translated works in English and Chinese. Focusing on Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’, a collection of elegant and philosophical poems, as a source text, Ma and Wang analyse four Chinese target texts by Zheng Zhenduo, Yao Hua, Lu Jinde and Feng Tang and consider their linguistic complexities through SFL. This book analyses the source text and the target texts from the perspectives of the four strata of language, including graphology, phonology, lexicogrammar and context. Ideal for researchers and academics of SFL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis, Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese provides an in-depth exploration of SFL and its emerging prominence in the field of Translation Studies.

The Translator’s Mirror for the Romantic: Cao Xueqin’s Dream and David Hawkes’ Stone is a book that uses precious primary sources to decipher a master translator’s art in Stone, a brilliant English translation of the most famous Chinese classic novel Dream. This book demonstrates a bilingual close reading which sheds light on both the original and its translation. By dividing the process of translation into reading, writing, and revising, and involving the various aspects of Sinological research, textual criticism, recreation, and literary allusions, this book ventures to emphasise the idea of translation as a dialogue between the original and the translated text, between the translator and his former self, and a learning process both for the translator and the reader of his translation. Any student of Chinese language and literature, or Chinese–English translation, will benefit from this book; for students and scholars who want to study David Hawkes and his Stone, this book is an indispensable aid. Readers will be interested to see how a non-theoretical analysis could be used to evaluate this translation, for it makes an extremely important and useful contribution to this subject.

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Natural Language Processing, JapTAL 2012, Kanazawa, Japan, in October 2012. The 27 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine translation, multilingual issues, resouces, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, as well as speech and generation.