Cultivation of Foreign Language Talents Viewed from the Perspective of Educational Ecology

From the perspective of educational ecology, this study systematically and comprehensively analyzes the ecological imbalance existing in the process of the cultivation of foreign language talents. By taking the outer dynamic balance between individual development and the external environment and the inner balance of the development of the individual as guiding principles and by employing the basic laws in ecology, this study puts forward some suggestions to establish a positive, interactive and ecological cultivation mode for international foreign talents, embodying the ecological philosophy of people-orientation and sustainable development

An Empirical Study of Schema Theory and Its Role in Reading Comprehension

Schema is the abstract and organized knowledge structure. Access to pertinent schema in reading would greatly facilitated meaning extraction and meaning retention. This paper quantitatively and qualitatively explored the effect of schema and how it works in reading process and finds out that readers with appropriate schema would perform significantly better than those without in both immediate and delayed recalls. That is they would recall more correct ideas and omit fewer ideas and in their expansion of the original text, more elaborations rather than distortions will be found. Besides, readers provided with schema tend to recall the text more coherently and logically

Investigating the translation of metaphors used in diagnosis and treatment in Chinese medicine classics Neijing and Shanghan Lun

The language used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) depicts a world of human physiology, pathology, diagnosis and treatment, in which metaphors serve as an essential vehicle for readers to understand fundamental but often abstract concepts in TCM. While previous work has investigated strategies for translating the TCM classics, the metaphors used to describe diagnosis and treatment and their English translations are critical in understanding TCM, and require a more systematic exploration. This study investigates the diagnosis- and treatment-related metaphors selected from two TCM classics, Neijing and Shanghan Lun, and their English renditions by translators from different professional backgrounds. The thesis also focuses on the analysis of the effectiveness of different translation strategies in delivering pertinent health-related information conveyed by the metaphors of the original texts. A multidimensional framework that combines a conceptual approach with linguistic and cultural elements was established to capture the complexity of the metaphors, particularly from the perspective of translation. The linguistic metaphors in this study were first identified from a purpose-built corpus using a CMT-based metaphor identification procedure adapted from Steen (2010). Following the conceptual metaphor inference procedure developed by Steen (2011), various conceptual metaphors were inferred from the linguistic metaphors. Corresponding English translations were also collected to investigate which translation strategies have been used and which strategy can most effectively deliver the health-related information conveyed by the metaphors. Four main strategies were employed in the English translations: 1) equivalent mapping, by which the source domain is retained; 2) using a simile to translate a metaphor; 3) direct narrative equivalence, which abandons the metaphor and narrates the medical knowledge directly; and 4) complemented equivalent translation, whereby the metaphor is explained with additional content. From the perspective of conveying health-related knowledge, equivalent mapping was effective for metaphors universally understood by Chinese and English readers. For culturally specific metaphors, especially when the metaphor relates to an important TCM concept, complemented equivalent translation, which can reconfigure the cognitive context for the reader, was most suitable. For metaphors not related to important concepts, direct narrative equivalence was found to be effective

A Multiple Case Study of Chinese-English Translation Strategies

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences of strategy patterns in Chinese-English translation by three translators with different expertise: the novice, the advanced student and the professional translator, as well as the effects of text types on translators’ strategies and cognitive performance. Cross-examining the TAPs, the Translog data and the interview shows that translators’ immediate reaction to the problem falls into three patterns: intuitional scheme, analytical scheme and instrumental scheme; Advanced student uses the largest number as well as the widest range of strategies; The novice turns most to the external tool—online dictionary for help. The higher the translator’s expertise and the more experiences s/he has, the more s/he uses the internal knowledge; Text types affect three translators’ strategies in different degree, and generally analytical scheme is more often used in poem than in the other two text types—the operating instruction and the advertisement. Translog data about average pause duration per word and the average pause ratio further validate that poem is the most cognitively demanding text

Measuring the difficulty of text translation: The combination of text-focused and translator-oriented approaches

This paper explores the impact of text complexity on translators’ subjective perception of translation difficulty and on their cognitive load. Twenty-six MA translation students from a UK university were asked to translate three English texts with different complexity into Chinese. Their eye movements were recorded by an eye-tracker, and their cognitive load was self-assessed with a Likert scale before translation and NASA-TLX scales after translation. The results show that: (i) the intrinsic complexity measured by readability, word frequency and non-literalness was in line with the results received from informants’ subjective assessment of translation difficulty; (ii) moderate and positive correlations existed between most items in the self-assessments and the indicator (fixation and saccade durations) obtained by the eye-tracking measurements; and (iii) the informants’ cognitive load as indicated by fixation and saccade durations (but not for pupil size) increased significantly in two of the three texts along with the increase in source text complexity

Minimally 3-restricted edge connected graphs

AbstractFor a connected graph G=(V,E), an edge set S⊂E is a 3-restricted edge cut if G−S is disconnected and every component of G−S has order at least three. The cardinality of a minimum 3-restricted edge cut of G is the 3-restricted edge connectivity of G, denoted by λ3(G). A graph G is called minimally 3-restricted edge connected if λ3(G−e)<λ3(G) for each edge e∈E. A graph G is λ3-optimal if λ3(G)=ξ3(G), where ξ3(G)=max{ω(U):U⊂V(G),G[U] is connected,|U|=3}, ω(U) is the number of edges between U and V∖U, and G[U] is the subgraph of G induced by vertex set U. We show in this paper that a minimally 3-restricted edge connected graph is always λ3-optimal except the 3-cube

Genetic study of hematopoiesis in zebrafish - Characterization of zebrafish udu mutant, positional cloning and functional study of udu gene

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH