Evaluating the impact of a Presessional English for Academic Purposes Programme: a corpus based study

This thesis investigates the impact of an intensive programme of English for academic purposes upon the second language writing development of postgraduate students at the University of Birmingham. The study uses a 300,000 word corpus (EAPCORP) of essays from the beginning and end of the programme covering two separate years, in order to identify and measure written linguistic feature development. A multidimensional investigative approach underpins both of the two main analytical tools applied to the EAPCORP, with the basic premise that it is possible to identify register differences between different types of language by the assemblage and analysis of a large number of textual features. Firstly, Coh-Metrix is a programme employing a range of algorithms applied to a series of data bases to analyse the linguistic structure of texts. Secondly, MAT (Multidimensional Analysis Tagger) employs algorithms developed by Douglas Biber and uses an automated text tagger. The analyses suggest strongly that there has been progression from the initial production of a high frequency of features characteristic of speech to that more typical of academic writing. The results emphasise the importance of well-designed EAP programmes especially in uncertain economic contexts

Subtitling Humour from the Perspective of Relevance Theory: The Office in Traditional Chinese

Subtitling the scenes containing humorous utterances in cinematic-televisual productions encounters a myriad of challenges, because the subtitler has to face the technical constraints that characterise the professional subtitling environment and the cultural barriers when reproducing humorous utterances for viewers inhabiting another culture. Past studies tend to explore more limited humour-related areas, which means that a more comprehensive picture of this specialised field is missing. The current research investigates the subtitling of humour, drawing on the framework of relevance theory and the British sitcom The Office, translated from English dialogue into Traditional Chinese subtitles. This research enquires into whether or not relevance theory can explain the subtitling strategies activated to deal with various humorous utterances in the sitcom, and, if so, to what extent. The English-Chinese Corpus of The Office (ECCO), which contains sample texts, media files and annotations, has been constructed to perform an empirical study. To enrich the corpus with valuable annotations, a typology of humour has been developed based on the concept of frame, and a taxonomy of subtitling strategies has also been proposed. The quantitative analysis demonstrates that the principle of relevance is the main benchmark for the choice of a subtitling micro-strategy within any given macro-strategy. With the chi-square test, it further proves the existence of a statistically significant association between humour types/frames and subtitling strategies at the global level. The qualitative analysis shows that the principle of relevance can operate in a subtle way, in which the subtitler invests more cognitive efforts to enhance the acceptability of subtitles. It also develops three levels of mutual dependency between the two variables, from strong, weak to null, to classify different examples. Overall, this study improves our understanding of humour translation and can facilitate a change in the curricula of translator training

Power and the translator: Joseph Conrad in Chinese translations during the Republican era (1912-1937)

When he died in 1924, Joseph Conrad, who was named a ‘racist’ by Chinua Achebe (1977) and defended by others as taking an anti-imperialist stance (Brantlinger 1996), was a total stranger to the Chinese readers, whose country was made a semi-colony in the late nineteenth century. In the 1930s, however, four of his works were translated and published within four years, all commissioned by the Committee on Editing and Translation funded by the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture. The thesis investigates the Chinese translations of Conrad’s works published during the Republican Era in 1912-1937, exploring the power relations between the translators as agents and the social structure in which they operated. The thesis is divided into six chapters. After the introduction, I describe, in Chapter 2, the translators’ practice in terms of their narrating positions on the textual and paratextual levels as reflected in the translations of the sea stories borrowing analytical models on narrative discourse devised by Gérard Genette and Roger Fowler. I proceed in Chapter 3 with an account of the commissioner, tracking down the organization of the China Foundation and the Committee on Editing and Translation which initiated the project of translating World Classics (including Conrad’s works) in the 1930s. In Chapter 4, I reassess the notion of ‘faithfulness’, a key concept in the discourse of translation in theory and criticism at the time. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice as the theoretical framework, I argue that the practice of the translators, who created the image of Conrad through their translations, can be explained with reference to their relations with other agents (commissioners, theorists, critics, etc.) occupying different positions within the intellectual field, and the habitus which mediated their position and the social structure they were engaged in Chapter 5, followed by the conclusion

Language as Ritual: Saying What Cannot Be Said with Western and Confucian Ritual Theories

This dissertation addresses one of the classical philosophical and theological problems of religious language, namely, how to speak meaningfully about matters that appear to be inexpressible. While addressed extensively in a variety of literatures across cultures, the problem persists, particularly in regard to harmonizing theological, philosophical, and linguistic perspectives. The dissertation argues that (i) language is best understood as a species of ritual; (ii) so understood, religious language speaks to and about religious realities subjunctively, that is, as if such realities could be talked about; and (iii) this way of understanding language achieves greater harmony among philosophical and linguistic approaches while achieving some degree of cross-cultural generality. The argument begins with a cross-cultural comparison between modern social scientific ritual theories, especially that of Roy A. Rappaport, and the Confucian ritual theory of Xunzi. This generates a novel theory of ritual capable of engaging theories of language that have emerged in modern linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, and hermeneutics. The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce provides the unifying framework for the theory, which leads to the first conclusion that language can be understood as a species of ritual. When language is understood as ritual, there are several options for interpreting religious speech as meaningful. An analysis of these alternatives on terms semantically demarcated by Hilary Putnam leads to the conclusion that language expresses theological insights in the same way it expresses anything else: as if reality and its elements were the way the language form and process construes and renders them. This analysis both advances critiques of language as understood under the linguistic turn, especially by Terrence W. Deacon and Daniel L. Everett, and establishes the second and third conclusions of the thesis