Abstracts of Major Papers in This Issue

s of Major Papers in This Issue

A Probe into Shapiro’s maneuvers of translation of Chinese political satiric verse (Ren Dongsheng & Wang Fang,p1)

Sidney Shapiro, one of the foreign translators participating in the New China’s national translation practice, translated individually quite a number of Chinese Cis and poems including the works by Mao Zedong and all styles of poems inShuihuzhuanin addition to Chinese classic and modern novels and stories. This paper probes into Shapiro’s English translations of the 24 political satiric verses fromSoySauceandPrawns:SatiricPoliticalVerse, an anthology of Yuan Shuipai from 1943 to 1963. It is found that Shapiro’s version suggests masterly translation maneuver in terms of creative rendering of diction, representation of force in verse lines and reconstruction of poetic form through creative words’ selection and refining, run-on line and rhetoric application and imitation and rhyming, hence a good balance is achieved between an approach of target-reader-orientation and preserving the political satire of the original verses.

On Victor Mair’s translations of Dunhuangbienwen(Xiao Zhibing, p8)

Victor Mair is an American sinologist and expert on Tunhuangology, who initialized his academic life with the translations of Dunhuangbienwenand then translated volumes of Chinese classics. Following the principle of fidelity in his translation, Mair gave priority to preserving the formal features of the original texts with different means and strategies. Under the premise of seeking accuracy of meaning in translating, Mair attempted to achieve equivalence of the formal features in target texts to the greatest extent possible. Also, Mair applied the method of annotated translation to secure accuracy and faithfulness of the target texts, which revealed his translation process and set a model in translating Dunhuangbienwen.

A Study on the example-sentences compiling and usage analysis for functional items in monolingual (English-English) learner’s dictionaries——Taking the infinitive marker “to”inCambridgeAdvancedLearner’sEnglish-EnglishDictionary( 4thEdition) as an example (Ma Zhigang & Wang Jiaming,p32)

One of the major functions of monolingual (English-English) learner’s dictionaries is to provide appropriate grammatical knowledge and usage examples for users. However, current monolingual dictionaries are inadequate in incorporating the implicit grammatical knowledge into examples, thus not fully representing the systema between vocabulary and grammar. To be of practical assistance to mastering English language, the present paper proposes that examples sentences be compiled from the perspective of explicating grammatical knowledge of the infinitive marker “to”, thereby assisting dictionary users to acquire grammatical knowledge.

Ethical identity and ethical choice of Connie inWomanontheEdgeofTime(Wu Ling,p57)

As a representative work of ecofeminism,WomanontheEdgeofTimetells the story of an American woman Connie who can travel to the future. Taking the theory of ethical literary criticism as the research perspective and starting from the loss of Connie’s moral identity, this paper explores human’s ethical dilemmas represented by Connie in the 1970s. Through her free access to the utopian and the dystopian societies, Connie is able to recognize her own ethical identity, which signifies the ethical choices made by humans in certain special historical phases. The utopia and dystopia societies which the author describes have the function of value orientation to the ethics of human choice. The novel demonstrated the lost and return of human nature during the processes of constructing and deconstructing the two societies. The novel contains rich ethical teachings and enlightenment. At the same time, it also entrusted the author’s deep thinking to the social and natural environment that the human survives on in the post-industrial era.

A study on teacher-and-peer support and its relationship with academic achievement of English learners (Guo Jidong & Niu Ruixin,p67)

Employing factor analysis and structural equation modeling, this study examines the relationship between teacher-and-peer support and EFL learners’ academic achievement. The results reveal that teacher-and-peer support contains 3 components: peer support, teacher support, and peer influence. These 3 components are significantly positively correlated with English academic achievement. Moreover, all of them strongly predict English academic achievement. Hence English teachers should try to fully enhance teacher-and-peer support and increase the efficiency of EFL teaching and learning.