Chinese-English Dictionary Research Articles

Dancing with Ideology: Grammatical Metaphor and Identity Presentation in Translation

This paper begins with an account of a high-profile political speech event centring on a Chinese slangy expression ‘[we] bu zheteng’ when it was used by the then Chinese President Hu Jintao in a 2008 speech, of which the Chinese government preferred a zero-translation despite the existing translations and various choices already available in Chinese-English dictionaries. The paper then discusses from the perspective of grammatical metaphor how and why an innocent-looking pragmatic usage has given rise to a series of ideologically charged debates over its translation. To that end, the paper conducts a critical review of grammatical metaphor, a key Systemic Functional Linguistic concept in describing congruence-to-metaphor evolution of language. Our cross lingual observation of this translation-related speech event enables us to argue that different textual means of presentation/concealment of human participation in transitivity are key to accounting for the discursive function of grammatical metaphors and to discerning the “chain” between congruent and metaphorical expressions. In the light of concealment of human participation in the transitivity process, the paper also observes that it is the association between the vague self-referencing ‘we’ and the adverse actions/situations, that is, (causing) commotions, alluded to by the term zheteng that has made a semantically explicit translation ideologically less desirable. As such, this operation of zero translation appears to be an instance of discursive manoeuvre rather than a sign of semantic impasse. To substantiate its theoretical claim, the paper relates the case to some similar political speech events in the world’s political arena and demonstrates how, prompted by this functional awareness of grammatical metaphors, one may devise a translation with better informed sensitivity to identity presentation/concealment in discourse.

Between lexicography and intercultural mediation: linguistic and cultural challenges in developing the first Chinese–English dictionary

ABSTRACTAlmost 200 years ago Scottish protestant missionary Robert Morrison published the first volume of A Chinese–English Dictionary, the first bilingual dictionary of Chinese and English ever published. While some bilingual vocabularies and dictionaries of the Chinese language in other European languages had been produced earlier, Morrison's achievement in compiling and publishing a complete bilingual dictionary of the Chinese language in English while residing in China was a significant milestone. This paper explores the way Morrison positioned himself as a bilingual lexicographer between two very different languages and their associated cultures; cultures that had very little interaction prior to his task of dictionary compilation. He undertook the task in a context in which the study of Chinese language, ownership of books in Chinese, and printing materials in Chinese were all prohibited. His dictionary entries, illustrative examples, and cultural explanations went beyond typical bilingual lexicography. His efforts were more so an experience in intercultural mediation; the provision of detailed cultural and contextual explanations of the Chinese language, made accessible to a Western readership wishing to learn Chinese and understand its culture. The impact of his efforts on future Chinese bilingual lexicographic work in China, and reflections on his achievements, are discussed.

On Labors of Love and Language Learning: Xiaolu Guo Rewriting the Monolingual Family Romance

This essay investigates how the Chinese-British author and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) engages in the rewriting of what Yasemin Yildiz termed the “monolingual linguistic family romance” (2012). Written in a learner’s English, which improves throughout its fictional diary pages, the novel describes and enacts the labor of love that language learning always connotes, and thus questions the unique affective investment in the mother tongue. Xiaolu Guo’s decision to harness the very process of a protagonist’s self-translation as the focus of her first novel in English creates an experimental text that stages the inequity between her character’s slowly improving English and a perception of her unwritten dialect and official Mandarin Chinese as equally oppressive, between the hegemony of global English and the imposition of Mandarin Chinese as the language of her education, between Western capitalism and Chinese communism. Using Pascale Casanova’s insights into the unequal linguistic exchanges both in translation and the literary world, I argue that as it presents a writer’s alienation from either stepmother’s or lover’s tongue in literary endeavor, Dictionary for Lovers investigates and destabilizes both affective relationships in order to put in relief the asymmetry of globalized exchanges at their basis.

De espejos y máscaras. Una propuesta para la traducción de los lenguajes «rotos»

This article deals with the challenge posed in the translation into Spanish by the translator’s choice of a certain linguistic model that could cause misunderstandings or awkwardness in some Spanish-speaking areas. The challenge is twofold when the original makes a more or less extensive use of linguistic variation. In such cases “suspension of disbelief” – upon which the reader’s contract is based – calls for imaginative solutions on the part of the translator. Along with general reflections on translation, some examples from the Spanish translation of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full (two works that rely on an extensive use of distorted language) are offered in order to show how this kind of difficulty can be addressed in literary terms, avoiding the misleading paradigm of fidelity and equivalence. Some reactions to this approach by ordinary readers and professional reviewers are also offered.

An Introduction to An English-Chinese Dictionary and A Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary—Views on the Language and Society in Canton Area From Two Unpublished Official Collative Dictionaries Compiled in the 18th Century

An Introduction to An English-Chinese Dictionary and A Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary—Views on the Language and Society in Canton Area From Two Unpublished Official Collative Dictionaries Compiled in the 18th Century

Making a User-friendly Bilingual Dictionary for Chinese Translators: on the Revision ofA New Century Chinese-English Dictionary

This paper gives an account of how a dictionary project, the revision of A New Century Chinese-English Dictionary (2003) with Hui Yu and Du Ruiqing as editors-in-chief, is currently being undertaken. Building on the lexicographic objectives, framework, and excellent lexicographic tradition of independent study of the first edition, the new edition of the said dictionary aims at making itself more useful to translators through a full-scale revision. The focus of the discussion is on how the revisers have followed the three major principles of dictionary revision, that is, addition, deletion, and modification, to improve the user-friendliness of the new edition. The purpose of the discussion is not only to offer our international colleagues a picture of the development of Chinese bilingual lexicography, an area not adequately represented in international lexicographic literature yet, but also to give a detailed account of the actual revision of the said dictionary, which serves the practical needs of Chinese translators and writers who use English for language production purposes.

Corpora and Collocations in Chinese-English Dictionaries for Chinese Users

The paper identifies the major problems of the Chinese-English dictionary in representing collocational information after an extensive survey of nine dictionaries popular among Chinese users. It is found that the Chinese-English dictionary only provides the collocation types of v+n and v+n, but completely ignores those of v+adv, adj+n and adv+adj. And as a common practice, this kind of dictionary doesn’t give different collocates of synonymous equivalents. Besides, it provides collocational information on the basis of the headword, but not the equivalents. This leads to the suggestions for a new way of representing collocational information in Chinese-English dictionaries. The most important thing is that the Chinese-English dictionary should provide collocational information about the equivalents instead of the headword. All the five types of collocation are given the same status in a dictionary. Moreover, with corpus data, the selective restrictions of the English equivalents in meanings, frequency and semantic prosody should be explicitly represented to dictionary users by glosses, illustrative examples, collocation columns, etc. It is argued that by doing so, the dictionary will better meet the needs of the users.

Bilingual Lexicography as Recontextualization: A Case Study of Illustrative Examples in A New English–Chinese Dictionary

Different from previous research that tends to view bilingual dictionaries as objective and value-free representations of the languages and the world, this paper argues that bilingual lexicography is a complex site of ideological struggle. It conceptualizes bilingual lexicography as recontextualization from the perspective of critical discourse analysis and explores how the recontextualization of lexicographical discourse across cultures and contexts results in the transformation and transfer of meaning. It makes a diachronic comparative analysis of illustrative examples from two editions of A New English–Chinese Dictionary and finds that as the recontextualizers (the dictionary compilers) re-situate the source dictionary in a new context, elements of the prior lexicographic discourse are placed in new perspectives and orientations, brought to the foreground or pushed to the background. By showing how the recontextualizers attempt to de-politicize the words and examples in the source dictionary by using discursive strategies like deleting, replacing, re-signifying, etc., the paper suggests that the ideological functions of contemporary Chinese dictionaries have given way to their educational and social functions. This paper contributes to the emerging critical lexicography, which calls attention to ideology and power in (bilingual) lexicography.

A Bicentenary in Robert Morrison's Scholarship on China And his Significance for Today

AbstractRobert Morrison (1782–1834), the first Protestant missionary to China, was responsible for the completion of the earliest Chinese-English Dictionary in 1814. Though this work would not have reached publication without the help of Chinese assistants, and of the printer P. P. Thoms (1790–1855), even so Morrison's scholarly achievements in this and other aspects of Chinese studies were prodigious. This survey of recent research makes clear the continuing value of his writings to contemporary scholars, and also suggests that he was not simply more seriously engaged in attempting to understand China than his contemporaries but also more enlightened than a good number of his successors in missionary work.

Compilations of Law Dictionaries in New China and Their Roles on Standardization of Translated Legal Terms

From the perspectives of foreign-Chinese bilingual law dictionaries, Chinese-foreign bilingual law dictionaries, and monolingual Chinese law dictionaries, this paper reviews the compilation and publication of law dictionaries in China over the past six decades following the founding of New China in 1949, especially over the past three decades after the policy of reform and opening up was adopted in 1978. This paper reevaluates the translated legal terms covered and defined in the Legal Dictionary of the Soviet Union (1957), Law Dictionary (1980), Oxford Large Dictionary of Law (1988), Chinese-English Glossary of Terms of Laws and Regulations of People’s Republic of China (1998) and English-Chinese Dictionary of Anglo-American Law (2003) to analyze the roles of law dictionaries on the standardization of the translated Chinese legal terms.

The Making of the First Chinese-English Dictionary

Summary The first printed Chinese–English dictionary was the Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts compiled by Robert Morrison (1782–1834) published between 1815 and 1823. Two hundred years later it is still in use. This paper traces the tradition of missionary bilingual lexicography in China from its origins down to Morrison. While early manuscript bilingual dictionaries solved the problems of transliteration, alphabetical arrangement of Chinese entries, definition and grammatical information, Morrison improved the transliteration system which he had inherited, invented a new index system matching alphabetically arranged transliterations with Chinese characters, and provided a large number of citations from Chinese classics and popular contemporary Chinese books. Morrison’s lexicographical legacy is reflected in the fact that his transliteration was adopted as the basis for the Wade-Giles system and that the macrostructure and microstructure of his dictionary became a model for Samuel Wells Williams’ (1812–1884) Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language 漢英韻府 (1874, re-edited until 1909) and Henry Allen Giles’ (1845–1935) Chinese-English Dictionary (1892, last ed., 1972.)

한ㆍ중ㆍ일 성경의 성서 히브리어 ‘베라크’ 이해

The purpose of this article is to suggest that the Korean expression of ‘축복(祝福)하다’(to bless) used in Bible translations has both meanings of (1) ‘to confer happiness, as God’ and (2) ‘to pronounce a wish of happiness to someone’. There are two reasons to support this suggestion. First of all, most Korean Christians usually ask for blessings in prayer with the expression, ‘축복하소서’ which would mean “O God, bless us!” or the like. Second, modern Chinese and Japanese Bibles use the expression of ‘축복’(祝福) for both meanings mentioned above.<BR> Korean versions of the Bible such as the Old Version (1911), the Revised Version (1938), and the Common Translation (1977) have traditionally differentiated ‘축복하다’, which literally means ‘to pray a blessing for someone’, from ‘복을 베풀다’, ‘to be given a blessing by God’. In contrast, modern Japanese and Chinese Translations of the Bible have not differentiated one from the other. By modern Japanese Bibles, I am referring to the Colloquial Translation (1955), the New Interconfessional Translation (1987), and the Iwanami Shoten Translation (2004). Modern Chinese Translations of the Bible include the Lu Chen-Chung Version (1970) and the Catholic Studium Biblicum Version (1968). Somewhat different from these Bibles, the Old Chinese Delegates’ Version (1854) and the Japanese Meiji Translation (1888) take the Hebrew verb b?rak(* ??? ) literally as both ‘(God) to grant a blessing to someone’ and ‘(human) to pray to give a blessing to someone’. Interestingly enough, the English-Chinese Dictionary (1866-1869) by W. Lobscheid lists both meanings of ‘祝福’ to the entry of ‘to bless’.<BR> Korean language belongs to Chinese character culture so we Koreans can follow both usage of ‘祝福’ in the Chinese and Japanese Bible translations. Nowadays Koreans use the expression of ‘축복’(祝福) to imply both meanings. Indeed, the language itself has been changing over the time.

English and Mobility: Linguistic and Stylistic Transformations in New Anglophone Literatures

This article investigates the interconnected themes of language, mobility and identity and their narrative renditions in the anglophone context by providing an interdisciplinary analysis of some extracts from two recent novels, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2008) and We Need New Names ( 2014), respectively written by Xiaolu Guo and NoViolet Bulawayo, who resourcefully elaborate new linguistic and textual forms to express the plural questions of identity. The helpful notion of ‘language and mobility’ discussed by Pennycook (2010) lends support to the argument that language, identity and mobility represent coterminous cultural forces at work in the constant shaping and changing of the contemporary globalised and postcolonial world

Curious Lexicographic Relic of the Cultural Revolution

AbstractThis paper considers the fact that many verbal Chinese idioms are defined in recent Chinese-English dictionaries with misleading parts of speech — they are generally described only as being nouns. This situation originates in the 1978 Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn 汉英词典 of Wú Jǐngróng 吴景荣, whose definitions have exerted overwhelming influence on the field since then. We document Wú's principal sources and the viewpoints that motivated him, including the heavy political pressure to which his lexicographic team were subjected in the late Cultural Revolution. In addition, we consider Wú's anomalous misreading of the purpose of the influential Giles and Mathews dictionaries, which had been to document the many senses of each character with multi-character words, rather than to document multi-character words per se.

Structural image retrieval using automatic image annotation and region based inverted file

Image retrieval has lagged far behind text retrieval despite more than two decades of intensive research effort. Most of the research on image retrieval in the last two decades are on content based image retrieval or image retrieval based on low level features. Recent research in this area focuses on semantic image retrieval using automatic image annotation. Most semantic image retrieval techniques in literature, however, treat an image as a bag of features/words while ignore the structural or spatial information in the image. In this paper, we propose a structural image retrieval method based on automatic image annotation and region based inverted file. In the proposed system, regions in an image are treated the same way as keywords in a structural text document, semantic concepts are learnt from image data to label image regions as keywords and weight is assigned to each keyword according to spatial position and relationship. As the result, images are indexed and retrieved in the same way as structural document retrieval. Specifically, images are broken down to regions which are represented using colour, texture and shape features. Region features are then quantized to create visual dictionaries which are similar to monolingual dictionaries like English or Chinese dictionaries. In the next step, a semantic dictionary similar to a bilingual dictionary like the English–Chinese dictionary is learnt to mapping image regions to semantic concepts. Finally, images are then indexed and retrieved using a novel region based inverted file data structure. Results show the proposed method has significant advantage over the widely used Bayesian annotation models.

Present Chinese-English dictionaries of traditional Chinese and Western medicine: problems and thinking

Present Chinese-English dictionaries of traditional Chinese and Western medicine: problems and thinking

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This essay examines the notion of “translational writing” – literary texts which bear the traces of multiple languages, foregrounding and dramatizing the processes of translation of which they are both product and representation – through detailed examination of two recent novels set in London: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). Both novels are narrated by their female protagonists, whose movement between linguistic planes defines a distinctively feminized, translingual identity. Each works to destabilize the assumed relationship between language and national belonging, in part by recasting London as a space of translation: a city of immigrants defined by its polyglossia, and a node in a deterritorialized transnational linguistic order. Yet, while both novels explore the possibilities, risks, and limitations of a life lived between languages, they also demonstrate that translational literature, like translation theory, offers no consensus on the practice of translation. Their divergent conclusions – about the relationship between languages, about the nature and purposes of translation, about the connections between language and truth – reveal much about the complexities of translational writing.

A Novel Category Vector-Based Cross Language Text Categorization Method

Due to the globalization on the Web, monolingual Text Categorization can be reformulated as a cross language TC task. To establish a practical English-Chinese CLTC system, a feature translation method and a fast text categorization algorithm based on a novel Category Vector Space Model are proposed in this paper. Provided a Chinese-English bilingual dictionary in scientific and technological fields, parallel corpora was employed to append translation probability value to bilingual dictionary so as to disambiguate translation results. The experiment results show that the CLTC system which was established by method in the paper is practical and valuable. The performance of Cross-Language text categorization system exceeds that of Mono-Lingual text categorization system and the result is exciting.

The Oxford Chinese dictionary: English/Chinese - Chinese/English

By far the largest and most up-to-date single-volume English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionary available and endorsed by academics worldwide, the Oxford Chinese Dictionary has been designed both for English speakers learning Mandarin Chinese and Mandarin Chinese speakers learning English. It has been produced using the latest lexicographic methods and the unique dictionary resources of Oxford University Press in Oxford and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Beijing, together with an international body of expert advisors. The Oxford Chinese Dictionary contains over 300,000 words and phrases and 370,000 translations, including the latest vocabulary from computing, business, the media, and the arts, and tens of thousands of example phrases illustrating key points of construction and usage. There are over 300 cultural notes giving essential information about many aspects of life and culture in the Chinese- and English-speaking worlds. The dictionary is based throughout on corpus research for both English and Chinese, providing up-to-date evidence on real language. The English is based on the Oxford English Corpus, and the Chinese draws on the LIVAC corpus from the City University of Hong Kong. Extensive supplementary material includes sample letters and emails, guides to telephoning and text messaging in both Chinese and English, chronologies of Chinese history and culture, and features on particularly difficult aspects of the Chinese language, such as kinship terms and measure words. There are also over 50 pages of lexical and usage notes which contain helpful extra information about Chinese and English. The organization and layout have been designed for maximum clarity and accessibility. All Chinese headwords and compounds are shown with Pinyin transcriptions, so that the learner of Chinese can pronounce each one correctly. Chinese headwords are given in Simplified Chinese characters, but Traditional Chinese character versions are also given in brackets after the headwords when they differ from the Simplified form. All the English headwords are also shown with phonetics, so that the learner of English can pronounce each one correctly. The Chinese-English section of the dictionary is organised alphabetically by Pinyin and there is also a radical index which allows you to look up a character without knowing its Pinyin form. Explore our language resources on oxforddictionaries.com, Oxford's home for dictionaries and language reference. Updated regularly with the latest changes to words and meanings, the site provides hundreds of thousands of definitions, synonyms, and pronunciations in a range of languages. Access the highest quality language content, built from our extensive research, for free on your desktop or device.

Gao Yongwei (ed.) A New English-Chinese Dictionary (4th edition).

Gao Yongwei (ed.) A New English-Chinese Dictionary (4th edition).