The Choice of Tense in Translation into the Second Language

English tense is widely believed as one of the most problematic areas in the “interlanguage”, which includes non-native English speakers’ English writing and translations into the translator’s second language. This study aims to investigate the relationships between the tense choice in translation, the tense in the Chinese source text, and the translation competence of translators. A small Chinese-English parallel corpus has been built with 127 translations of Chinese press editorials by experienced native English speaking translators, experienced native Chinese speaking translators, and novice native Chinese speaking translators. Cross-tabulate analyses of this study have shown that the three groups of translators differ from one another significantly in their handling of marked Chinese past tense verbs, while they do not when translating Chinese sentences with contextually marked tense. This study suggests that in order to improve their translation quality, (1) experienced native Chinese speaking translators need to increase the percentages of Present Simple, Present Progress, Present Perfect, and Past Simple, and reduce the percentages of Past Perfect in their translation; (2) novice native Chinese speaking translators need to increase the percentages of Present Simple, and Present Progress, and reduce the percentages of Past Perfect, Past Simple, and Present Perfect in their translation

Orbital density wave induced by electron-lattice coupling in orthorhombic iron pnictides

In this paper we explore the magnetic and orbital properties closely related to a tetragonal-orthorhombic structural phase transition in iron pnictides based on both two- and five-orbital Hubbard models. The electron-lattice coupling, which interplays with electronic interaction, is self-consistently treated. Our results reveal that the orbital polarization stabilizes the spin density wave (SDW) order in both tetragonal and orthorhombic phases. However, the ferro-orbital density wave (F-ODW) only occurs in the orthorhombic phase rather than in the tetragonal one. Magnetic moments of Fe are small in the intermediate Coulomb interaction region for the striped antiferromangnetic phase in the realistic five orbital model. The anisotropic Fermi surface in the SDW/ODW orthorhombic phase is well in agreement with the recent angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments. These results suggest a scenario that the magnetic phase transition is driven by the ODW order mainly arising from the electron-lattice coupling.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure