The Mandala Sutra and Its English Translation: The New Dunhuang Museum Version Revised by Yang Zengwen

In this paper, after researching the natural language processing model, we use the knowledge representation technology to construct a knowledge base and use the sequence comparison algorithm to compare the sequences of Chinese and English translations, analyze the similarities and differences between the two sequences, and analyze the entropy of information between English and Chinese translations through the probabilistic theory and mathematical statistics method. On this basis, we analyze the differences between Chinese and English translations in terms of lexical dimension, syntactic dimension and articulation dimension and explore the differences in lexical richness and thematic concentration between Chinese and English based on “entropy”. The results show that Chinese is significantly higher than English translations in terms of language output length, sentence complexity, subordinate structure and phrase structure (p<0.001), and Chinese is significantly higher than English translations in terms of articulation (p<0.05). This paper provides an important reference value for studying the differences in stylistic features in Chinese-English translation.

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

Structuralists use the concept and methods of intertextuality to locate and fix literary meaning, yet poststructuralists employ the same term to disrupt notions of meaning, making it difficult to navigate through this paradox in textual and translation studies. When this term was incorporated into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) translation studies, the paradoxical meanings of the term were also adopted without resolving these paradoxes. This paper therefore focuses on the translation of a few key TCM terms, and attempts to clarify the following translation dilemmas that arise when attempting to apply the concept of intertextuality: 1) Intertextuality deconstructs clear and stable meanings and this leads to untranslatability; 2) It is impossible to reproduce the intertextual relations of the original; 3) The notion of equivalence in translation is therefore an illusion; 4) Translating becomes an intertextual practice itself, and the target text is just intertextually related to the source text. The paper probes into the potential usefulness and significance of intertextuality for TCM translation and finally proves that all dilemmas of translation can only be resolved through the very act of translating.

Background. The introduction provides a brief overview of the major translations of Shevchenko's works into English and the first reviews of Shevchenko's work in foreign criticism. Methods.The method of comparative translation, historical and philological analysis, the method of quantitative calculations, as well as the ecological theory used in modern translation studies are applied. Results. The article analyzes the methodological features of the interpretation of Taras Shevchenko's original works "Kateryna" and "My Testament" on the example of John Weir's English translations; in the context of the principles of ecological translation studies, the author considers certain techniques of English poetic translation that allow achieving semantic correspondence with the original while preserving ethno-cultural information. According to Nazim Hikmet, "...there are poets of one city, one village, one nation, but there are poets of all cities, all villages, all nations". Taras Shevchenko became such a poet – a poet of all nations – for the world, and his works continue to interest and excite not only Ukrainians, but also the Western world. Conclusions. The proof of this is the fact that today Shevchenko is translated into English, the most widespread language in the world, more intensively than ever before. And each translator interprets the works of this Ukrainian genius poet in a slightly different way, depending on the peculiarities of the cultural environment in which the translator was born and works. All these peculiarities of the translator's linguistic and cultural profile in the environment of their specific culture are studied by a new field of translation studies called ecotranslatology, or ecological translation studies, within which the research for this article was conducted.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Bible translations in German, French, Spanish and English targeted towards a range of cross-confessional audiences. It focuses on the key word translation of concepts such as freedom and slavery. It examines the translator’s choices and the pragmatic implications of these decisions for readers of translations of the Bible. The case study centres on the concepts of freedom and slavery in Paul’s letter to the Galatians with an intercultural corpus of 16 translations. Authorised and widely accepted translations in English, German, French and Spanish such as the Lutherbibel (1984) and Reina Valera (1989) are compared with new competing translations, such as the New Living Translation (Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, 2007), The Message (Peterson, The Message: the new testament in contemporary English. NavPress, Colorado Springs, 2005), and Die Volxbibel (). This study draws from the fields of Pragmatics, Translation Studies and Theology, to provide a unique cross-cultural examination of Galatians, and of sacred translation. It is found that the choices of the translator of sacred texts are not merely linguistic choices, but rather they are often rooted in various ideological and theological positions.

The Age of Translation

On 12 February 2020, while on an international tour promoting Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, the translator of the book, Omid Tofighian, participated in a seminar at Utrecht University, organised by Australian academic, Anna Poletti (associate professor of English language and culture, Utrecht University). Poletti is also co-editor of the journal Biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly, which published a special issue on No Friend but the Mountains in 2020 (Vol. 43, No. 4). The seminar involved Poletti, Tofighian and translation scholar, Onno Kosters (assistant professor of English literature and translation studies, Utrecht University) in conversation. Iranian–Dutch filmmaker, Arash Kamali Sarvestani, co-director with Boochani of the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017), was in attendance, as well as the Dutch publisher, Jurgen Maas (Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas, Dutch translation based on the English translation). The event was titled ‘No Friend but the Mountains: Translation in Digital Times’. The following dialogue, ‘Translation in Digital Times: Omid Tofighian on Translating the Manus Prison Narratives’, is derived from this seminar and focuses on Tofighian’s translation of the book from Persian/Farsi into English. The topics covered also include the Dutch translation from Tofighian’s English translation, genre and anti-genre, horrific surrealism, Kurdish elements and influences, the Kurdish translation (from Tofighian’s English translation), publication of the Persian/Farsi original, translation as activism, process and technology.

The article deals with the comparative characteristics of rendering proper names in the most widespread English and Ukrainian translations of the Old Testament (Pentateuch). The author makes some generalizations concerning the lexical and semantic groups of nominations, characteristic of the confessional style, as well as its typical groups of lexis with the proper names being a major constituent among them. A comparative analysis of 586 proper names from each target text allowed to the make some conclusion concerning the ways of their rendering and correlation in the target languages. Though transliteration is the main technique in both languages, the correlation of the same letters in English and Ukrainian is not always consistent. The consistency has been found to be invariable only concerning the following English-Ukrainian pairs of letters: d – д, k – к, l – л, m – м, n – н, o – o, p – п, r – р, t – т, v – в. Other letters, as well as digraphs ch, sh, ph and th, do not have consistent counterparts and are characterized by a varying degree of inconsistency. This may be accounted for by a variety of reasons, among them: a considerable (450 years) gap between the first English and Ukrainian translations, which may have contributed to the changes in the approaches to transliteration; following in the different traditions (Western or Eastern) of transliteration in rendering certain letters, specifically concerning the pair of the letters b – в, or th digraph; a greater impact on the Ukrainian translator on the part of numerous Bible translations into other languages (particularly into Russian), which were absent at the time the first English translation was done etc. Other reasons for the discrepancies might include the translators’ individual characteristics, failure to maintain the same strategy throughout the entire translation, their striving to create euphony and to avoid the sound combinations undesirable in the target language.

How do we know what Shakespeare’s plays sounded like in his time, or Sappho’s verses, or the tales of ancient Sumer? As they were written in phonetic scripts, modern historical linguists have largely been able to reconstruct the sounds of these works. Written Chinese has always been a logographic and not a phonetic script, and with the rapid pace of phonetic variation and change, many of the euphonic patterns in ancient Chinese texts of ritual and history have been lost for millennia. While very general categories of rhyme and correlations between characters based on ancient rhyming poetry have been proposed by Chinese scholars throughout the ages, until developments in Western historical linguistics were applied to Chinese over the past century, the sounds of this ancient language remained obscure. However, thanks to modern advances in computer database technology, digital texts and digital tools, a wide variety of phonological data for ancient Chinese (including several recently-developed systems for reconstructed pronunciations) can now be employed to provide empirical documentation and analysis of the lost euphony and phonorhetorical structures in these ancient texts for the first time. In this study I utilize a tripartite framework for philological inquiry, grounded in the equal consideration of semantics, metrics and acoustics. In general, over the past two millennia, most Chinese philological studies have focused upon detailed exegeses of the semantics of a word, passage or text. Metrical features and sentence prosody have also received some attention, as various forms of literary expression in Chinese have been governed by conventions of style and form; this is particularly true of poetry, but also of patterned and parallel prose. This study argues that analyses of the phonetic patterns in a text should also play a significant role in any significant philological study, as it is often in the pairing of acoustic devices with metric and semantic structures that the true breadth, depth and beauty of literary expression can be felt most acutely. This framework represents a methodological shift in Chinese philology: until recently it was extremely difficult to accurately assess phonetic and acoustic structures in early Chinese texts; this was particularly true for compositions from the distant past. However, thanks to modern technology and recent advances in the field of Chinese phonology, it is now possible for any scholar to efficiently evaluate the acoustic structures of any Chinese text with as much accuracy as the aggregate of available phonological evidence can provide and thereby gain a more complete understanding of its acoustic constitution, its aesthetic and performative features, and the more subtle aspects of literary artistry which informed its composition and transmission. The phonological foundation of this study has been facilitated by a digital suite of lexical tools which I designed and which are the first method by which the hurdles to large-scale Chinese lexical spadework in the service of phonological analysis can efficiently be overcome: The Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (available online at edoc.uchicago.edu ), via which one can programmatically retrieve a wide range of phonological data, from both ancient and modern resources, for every character in any Chinese text. For this study, I used it to compile and evaluate proposed Old Chinese pronunciations for each graph in three of the earliest corpora of Chinese narrative texts: inscriptions longer than fifty graphs preserved on bronze vessels dating to the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.E.), the ten chapters of the Classic of Documents《尚書》 which scholars now generally believe were likely originally composed during the Western Zhou, and speeches of over one hundred graphs preserved in the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》. From these results, I chose four representative inscriptions from the Western Zhou inscriptional corpus, two representative chapters from the Classic of Documents, and three representative speeches from the Zuo Commentary as the basis for the analyses in chapters two through four. In these case studies, complete charts of each text (including a full transcription in Chinese, an Old Chinese phonological reconstruction for each graph, and an English translation) are provided, followed by detailed evaluations of the euphonic patterns and phonorhetorical devices employed within each text. The concluding chapter presents a brief overview of the main types of euphonic patterns and phonorhetorical devices evidenced within each corpus followed by general remarks on the euphonic and phonorhetorical characteristics common to all three corpora, and finds that there are demonstrable commonalities yet each corpus exhibits a unique range of euphonic and phonorhetorical devices which distinguishes it from the others, and from other early Chinese literary genres.

News, as an important transmission medium, can accurately and rapidly transmit the latest events in the world to the audience timely and accurately, while its most important function is to disseminate information and convey opinions. Through the textual characteristics of news and the specific characteristics of Chinese news in English translation, by listing a large number of news and news translation cases, this paper will discuss the characteristics of news translation, as well as the commonly used translation strategies and the specific translation methods of Chinese news translation. It also analyses the feasibility of combining the domesticating and foreignizing strategies and translation methods in previous news translations according to the cases. It is expected that by using case studies of Chinese news translation and publicity in English to find out how to get the optimal Chinese news translation in English, in order guide better Chinese news translation in English in the future.

It has been observed that the difference between human and machine translation in English–Urdu texts creates several challenges in producing accurate and natural translations. Machine translation tools are widely used, but they often fail to handle cultural expressions, idioms, and narrative flow. A number of studies are available on machine translation, but limited research is available to explore a detailed comparison between human and machine translation in English - urdu text types. Thereby applying qualitative methodology and using Skopos Theory, Dynamic Equivalence, and Error Analysis, the current study aims to compare the translations of narrative texts, figurative idioms, and formal informational passages. The study highlighted that machine translation performs well in simple informational sentences, but human translation provides more natural, culturally appropriate, and meaningful results. Providing clear comparison and analysis can be an effective way to understand the limitations of machine translation and the important role of human translators.

Functionalism in translation studies

The translations of the works by Orhan Pamuk are significant in a variety of ways. Some of the notable English translators of his eminent works, namely Maureen Freely and Güneli Gün, shed light on how translation strategies can be employed influentially and effectively in that they contribute to the cultural exchange between Türkiye and the United States and the United Kingdom. Their strategic choices not only promote their achievement in cultural transfer into target American and British audiences by their target texts but also reveal the ways wherein such translation studies notions and concepts such as identity and ideology of the translator have crossed over national boundaries in the globe, which is the playground for international agents, power relations, and bonds of sovereignty. Henceforth, the visibility of Maureen Freely and Güneli Gün in their target texts both illuminates the nature of the multifaceted profound role of the translator and enables us to interrogate the intertwined effects of the cultural exchange both on Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon audiences as receptive cultures and Turkish source culture as the hereditary of a rich cultural and literary tradition. Within this study, the English translations of Orhan Pamuk’s İstanbul Hatıralar ve Şehir by Maureen Freely and Yeni Hayat by Güneli Gün have been selected as the sampling. As for relevant methodology, textual analysis and document analysis have been prioritized. The findings both involve translation studies in particular and (global) culture in general.

The Story of the Stone written by Cao Xueqin was one of China’s Great Four Classical Novels. Many Redology researchers compared between the original text and English translations, but very few of them ever knew the Mongolian version, and compared it with the original Chinese texts and between English and Mongolian translations in new approach. This paper tends to investigate the unique features of Mongolian version. The comparison between the Mongolian and English versions is also conducted in the aspects of translating process, translations strategies and commentaries.

The growing global interest in Ukrainian literature and its increasing translation into English have intensified the need for a deeper theoretical understanding of how meaning is transferred across languages and cultures. This need is particularly evident in the field of children’s literature, where linguistic units function not merely as verbal signs but as carriers of imagery, emotional resonance, cultural knowledge, and early-stage cognitive models. In children’s texts, words activate conceptual structures that are shaped by the child’s developmental stage and world perception, making the translation process more complex than simple lexical substitution. Consequently, the study of translation must account for cognitive, cultural, and interpretative mechanisms that determine how meaning is constructed and reconstructed in the target text. The purpose of this research is to identify the mechanisms through which mental models represented in Ukrainian children’s prose are reproduced in English translations, and to trace the cognitive, semantic, and interpretative shifts that may occur in the course of translation. The study focuses on bilingual editions of works by contemporary authors and explores how translators navigate culturally bound concepts, figurative structures, and narrative frames that shape the child reader’s comprehension. Special attention is given to the way translation strategies either preserve or modify conceptual content, imagery, and pragmatic intent, all of which contribute to the construction of a child’s linguistic worldview. Methodologically, the research is grounded in a linguo-cognitive approach that conceptualizes translation as a multi-layered process of knowledge reconstruction. From this perspective, translating a text involves not only the transfer of semantic meaning but also the recreation of deeper conceptual structures - schemata, frames, and narrative scenarios, that are activated in the reader’s mind during text perception. This approach allows for the identification of meaning nodes that remain intact, undergo transformation, or become lost in translation. Analytical tools drawn from conceptual analysis, frame semantics, and interpretive cognitive rhetoric offer a comprehensive framework for examining how meaning is encoded, projected, and potentially shifted between the source text and the target text. The findings demonstrate that an adequate translation of children’s literature must be evaluated according to three interrelated criteria: cognitive, communicative, and receptive adequacy. This multidimensional evaluation highlights that literal or formal correspondence does not guarantee successful translation, especially in texts intended for young readers with distinct developmental, perceptual, and cultural characteristics. The study concludes that a linguo-cognitive orientation significantly expands traditional notions of translation adequacy by shifting the emphasis from formal equivalence to the reconstruction of mental models and pragmatic functions embedded in the source text. It also underscores the importance of a translator's ability to interpret and mediate the conceptual landscapes of both cultures and both linguistic communities.