The translation of Chinese local literature has always been a hot topic in translation field. Folk language, as the carrier of local literature, has drawn translators’ attention to its translation and is of great importance to the spread of Chinese culture. Translator model and the related factors for constructing that model are two significant factors in whether or not Chinese literature can walk toward the world successfully or not. The topic of translator model has been controversial in translation studies, and now the generally recognized translator model is “a Sinologist + a Chinese translator”. This article, selecting some high-frequency folk language expressions from Glodblatt’s translations of Mo Yan’s ten novels, compares Goldblatt’s translations with Chinese tranalators’ and analyzes the similarities and differences between them from three perspectives of meaning, folk flavor and fluency, so as to conclude the translation model of folk language, which is expected to provide some valuable reference for the Chinese culture to go global.

Folk language, when it enters literature, assumes literary nature, and folk literature is virtually a combination of literary folk language and folk theme. The glamour in translation of folk literature lies in representation of local cultural environment and uniqueness of its folk language. The paper reviews the shared aesthetic core, namely, revolutionary theme, folk custom and folk language, in three folk novels, Li Youcai Ban Hua, Xin ErNv Ying Xiong Zhuan and Ku Cai Hua, which were published in the 1940s and 1950s. Then it makes an analysis of the effect of representation of the aesthetic appealing of folk language in their English versions at the levels of rhyme, vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric. The authors contend that the glamour of Chinese folk language could be reproduced by means of strategies of imitation and adaptation. Whereas the former refers to source language-oriented imitation, target language-oriented imitation and dynamic imitation, the latter refers to generalization and specification, complemented representation, and translator’s creation, so that the aesthetic schema of folk language representation could be shaped. By conveying the local taste in folk novels and reserving the prints in folk language and marks of national languagein English translation, the Chinese nation’s language and culture could be protected and upheld in the process of outputting Chinese folk literature.

Idioms in short stories usually play the roles of making language expressions concise, presenting local features and shaping characters. This paper compares the three English versions of Black Li and White Li translated by Chi-Chen Wang, William A. Lyell and Don J. Cohn respectively. Based on truth-seeking-utility-attaining continuum evaluation model, it evaluates these three English versions from the perspective of translator behavior criticism. We find that in the truth-seeking-utility-attaining continuum, three English versions all tilt towards the utility-attaining end. But they have different degrees of utility-attaining. Chi-Chen Wang’s version has the highest degree of utility-attaining, Lyell’s version the second. Compared to these two versions, Cohn’s version has the highest degree of truth-seeking. With the comparative study of idiom translation in the three versions, we conclude that translation of Chinese idioms should keep the balance between truth-seeking and utility-attaining. Based on keeping faithfulness to the source text, translators should choose appropriate translation methods to achieve the aim of serving target readers and society. Meanwhile, since the shades of meaning would influence the reproduction of idioms’ functions in translation, translators should also pay attention to the choice of words for the representation of idioms.

Stereotyped as simple oral pronunciation training, pronunciation teaching is actually a process to guide the learners to achieve phonological acquisition of different phonetic forms. As a prerequisite for the successful acquisition of a foreign language, pronunciation teaching is one of the key links in foreign language teaching. This paper begins with a discussion of the main differences and similarities among phonology, phonetics and pronunciation teaching. Phonology is primarily concerned with the conceptual system of phonological symbols and phonetics mainly deals with the physical manifestation of these conceptual symbols. While the phonological concept of “a sound” may well be taken as a continuous “range of quantitative variations in phonetic values”, any value within which can be treated as that sound, the most representative one is the peak value of that range and its representativeness or typicality decreases gradually from the peak to the ends of both sides. The purport of pronunciation teaching is to help learners progress gradually from non-typical or non-representative interval values (or even some wrong values) to the most representative or typical peak value in their sound production and perception, and enable them to acquire the ability to distinguish phonetic values from different ranges, i.e., the phonological ability of sound production and perception. The fact that many of the beginners will often return to their original state soon after they receive the correction of their pronunciation reflects to some extent that a person’s oral pronunciation is in fact largely dependent on his underlying phonological awareness or ability. After identifying some of the major problems that exist in the current foreign language pronunciation teaching in China, the paper points out explicitly that the poor pronunciation of the non-native speakers mainly lies in the problem that the unstressed are often not unstressed enough in pronunciation. Therefore, in our pronunciation teaching, emphasis must be laid on the relation between the individual sounds and the overall natural flow that is composed of these sounds, and the relation between the individual stereotyped sound gesture and the general trend of elastic sound wave in our speech. Hence, the paper demonstrates in detail that our pronunciation teaching aims not merely to improve the learners' foreign language pronunciation, but more importantly to help the learners increase their phonological awareness, set up a system of inner phonological concepts of the language they intend to acquire, and truly grasp the actual pronunciation of the target language. 

This paper details a study on the perception and production of 7 English front vowels and diphthongs by 40 first-year English major students in read-aloud tasks before and after a 15-week pronunciation correction course. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design with a pretest, a posttest and a delayed posttest to compare the subjects’ rates of errors of vowel production in the read-aloud tasks of the three tests.  The results of the subjects’ reading of the three tests, together with their performance in the perception test, show that (1) the pronunciation correction course contributed to the subjects’ marked decrease of the vowel production inaccuracy, but did not guarantee long-term retention of the effect as the accuracy rate of the subjects’ vowel production after about a month’s winter break generally dropped compared with that at the end of the 15-week course; (2) the least improved as well as the most poorly retained vowels were front vowel /i:/ and diphthong /ai/; (3) low achievers demonstrated less improvement in vowel production accuracy, and average retention rate of the pronunciation correction effect; (4) there was no significant correlation between the subjects’ perception and production of the 7 English vowels and diphthongs. Suggestions are proposed for teaching English vowels in classroom settings in China.

By means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the processing of Chinese metaphors and their corresponding Chinese literal sentences of both NP+V+NP and NP+Vbe+NP sentence patterns is observed in order to explore the laws of Chinese metaphor processing. It is found that the comprehension of metaphorical sentences is more demanding than that of literal sentences as more activation can be seen from the metaphor processing; that both hemispheres do not play the same role to the contribution of novel metaphor processing and conventional metaphor processing, because the processing of conventional metaphors is mainly activated on the left hemisphere while the processing of novel metaphors or seudo-sentences also elicits the activation on the right hemisphere, which proves that both hemispheres are involved in the comprehension of Chinese metaphors in general, but with more involvement of the right hemisphere for novel metaphors than for conventional metaphors in particular; that both metaphors and literal sentences elicit extensive bilateral activation, including the Broca’s area and the Wernicke area on the left, which reveals that the typical language brain areas are involved in all language processing; and that the NP+V+NP processing will engage in more brain resources than the NP+Vbe+NP processing whether we compared these two sentence patterns by literal sentences or by metaphors. Generally speaking, our study supports the view of integration of whole brain processing and the Career of Metaphor Hypothesis concerning the Chinese metaphor processing.

The Adventures of Augie March is an autobiographical picaresque novel written by Saul Bellow, a Jewish American novelist. The narrator in the novel recalls in the first person pronoun the pursuit of a meaningful way of life of the major character Augie in the mediocre daily life which is full of contingency, and represents Augie’s dream of home and his spiritual sustenance. However, the home narrative in this novel has been ignored. In light of the views put forward by Lucien Goldmann in his theory of the sociology of literature, this article points out that the picaresque narrative in the novel and Augie’s pursuit of home embody Bellow’s viewpoint of home as a diaspora writer and his memory of Jewish tradition by analyzing the home narrative in The Adventures of Augie March. Meanwhile, the article argues that Augie’s adventures and his being always on the road reveal the state of solitude and restlessness of human beings in the modern society and Bellow’s spiritual sustenance of avoiding social reality. And then the article contends that Augie’s pursuit of meaningful life, his individualism and his imagination of a simple and warm home in a place very much similar to Thoreau’s Walden indicate that Bellow was influenced by American transcendentalism in his literary creation.

Regarding narrative form as a rhetorical means, rhetorical narrative theory emphasizes the multilayered communication among authorial agency, textual phenomena and reader response, and develops an effective analytical framework for narrative interpretation. A rhetorical narrative inquiry of The English Patient sheds light on the way the text guides readers’ narrative judgments and reconstructs its own ethics of identity. In terms of narrative structure, the text constructs its narrative trajectory moving in two directions temporally, juxtaposing the discussion of “personal identity” and “social identity” against the backdrop of World War II. The mystery of the identity of the patient and different conceptions of “identity” both serve as narrative dynamics to promote the progression of the narration, expanding readers’ multi-dimensional judgments about identity. In terms of narrative devices, the novel adjusts narrative distance by adopting “lyricality” and “portrait”, coupled with multiplicity of narrative frequency and points of view, thus inviting readers to understand and even identify with the main character’s ethics of identity. While suggesting its limitation of being too idealistic and in turn revealing the gap between the character’s ethics of identity and the implied author’s, the novel finally establishes its own ethics of reconciliation.

E.L. Doctorow’s The March highlights the ethical and epistemological significance of individual witness to historical understanding through its ironical foregrounding and forceful subversion of 19th century photography as a form of historical witness. This paper reveals the disadvantages and paradoxical ends of photographical witness by exposing how photography, under the sway of official discourse and personal motivation, distorts the historical truth of the Civil War and thereby manipulates history through its creation of a mythologized memory for posterity. On the contrary, The March accommodates a wide range of personalized accounts with its complex plot lines and multiple points of view, which manifest different aspects of the Civil War and present to the reader a realm of historical testimonies. In this way, historical truth of the Civil War resides in the multiplicity of individuals. This kind of historical understanding uncovers the human subject as the object of history, and history as a sector of intersubjectivity and a realm of testimonies. The March implies that history is history only to the extent that it has reached neither absolute explanation nor absolute singularity—to the extent that the meaning of it remains entangled in a realm of testimonies. In this respect, it becomes a more valid, more real and more truthful form of historical witness.