This paper revisits the four historical stages of Business English since China’s Reform and Opening-up forty years ago. It summarizes and presents the gradual development of curriculum, discipline theory and research since the launch of the undergraduate business English program. In terms of program development, the “Business English Teaching Guidance of the Teaching Quality Standards of University Foreign Languages and Literature Programs” has been drafted to define the required five types of knowledge, qualities and abilities of business English students. In terms of disciplinary structuring, three intra-and inter-disciplinary modes of MA and PhD programs have been put into trial. In terms of theory building, the cross-disciplines of foreign linguistics and applied linguistics, international trade and business administration have been integrated. In terms of research streams, eight clearly defined areas of studies have taken shapes with the growing publication of key journal articles, high level projects and books. In the end, the paper reflects upon the training objective, curriculum optimization, teaching evaluation approach, textbook writing and teacher development of the current Business English program in remenbrance of the great achievements and innovation of Chinese higher foreign language education over the forty years of reform and opening-up.

With the development of English translation of Du Fu’s poetry, studies on English translation of Du Fu’s poems have also continued to develop. However, these studies are mostly confined to the English translation of one or several specific poems. There are only a few papers or theses that comprehensively analyze and contrast aspects like translation thoughts, principles, strategies, etc., of translators in the process of their translation. Translator’s preface fall into the category of “paratext”; they usually contain a translator’s introduction to the original work, the author as well as his or her intent of translating, etc. Translator’s preface are carriers of the translator’s translation thoughts and contain numerous theoretical resources of translation principles, strategies, techniques, etc., which, therefore, are of great research value. This thesis selects 36 translated works of Du Fu’s poems and studies their prefaces, with particular reference to translation. On the one hand, the study analyses how a preface reflects a translator’s translation thoughts, strategies, techniques; and on the other hand, through a case study, it explores in what way these elements guide a translator’s translation practice. Thereby, it is expected to generalize some translation rules in order to provide guidance for research on the translation of Du Fu’s poems.

At the earlier stage Chomsky did not propose any movement rules on wh-questions, but he believed that wh-displacement was formed through permutation. In 1977, Chomsky proposed for the first time that the observation and description of linguistic phenomena must be guided by the principles of the universal grammar. Therefore, Chomsky argued that wh-movement must meet three conditions: Cyclic Condition, Subjacency Condition and Island Conditions. In the recent Minimalist Program, Chomsky proposed that movement was operated as the last resort for interface requirement in order to satisfy the principle of economy. There is no free and arbitrarily selected movement as it was supposed in the first stage. Movement is to satisfy the interface requirement, and the operation of movement is never triggered unless the uninterpretable features of the wh-words as well as those of the target head C are erased. The goal of movement is for feature checking. In the third stage of theoretical development, Chomsky followed his bio-linguistic perspective of language studies. According to the recent Strong Minimalist Thesis, the phenomenon of ubiquitous displacement in the wh-questions can be accounted for by the most basic property of language faculty—merge. Merge is a biological object, logically possible through internal merge and external merge. Displacement of wh-words is internal merge, pronounced in one place but interpreted in both places.

The corpus-based studies have shown that translated Chinese texts use more function words, such as conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns. By now, research concerning the overuse of prepositions has been done mainly focusing on a few specific prepositions, such as “bei” and “ba”, and as the corpus of specific genre has been used in each study, sometimes contradictory findings are produced. Therefore, a survey on the general features of prepositions in translated Chinese is conducted in this paper, based on a comparison between LCMC (The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese) and ZCTC (The ZJU Corpus of Translational Chinese), two comprehensive corpora covering different genres. It is found that the overuse of prepositions is significant in all the four genres (press, general prose, learned, fiction) in translated Chinese. Further explorations show that prepositions of time and place and those of content and object are much more frequently used, while prepositions of means and tools are less frequently used; and disyllables tend to be preferred in translated Chinese. These features of prepositions in translated Chinese may result from various factors combined. First, it is interference of English source language. Prepositions are much more frequently used in English than in Chinese and an observation of the English-Chinese parallel corpus indicates that many prepositions in translated Chinese are directly translated from prepositions and sometimes conjunctions or other phrases in the original English. The second factor is the characteristics of Chinese prepositions. In Chinese, prepositions often used at the beginning of a sentence or in the framework ending with a locative or other noun, such as prepositions of time and space and those of content and object, are more likely to be omitted. They are also more likely to be overused in translated Chinese. The third is the development of Chinese language itself. The modern Chinese sentence tends to be longer and more complex, and more prepositions is needed to help make clear the relationship between different parts of a sentence.

Since the 1950s, Chomsky’s transformational-generative linguistics, considered a “Chomskyan revolution”, has become a great focus of attention in the field of linguistics for his new linguistic concepts and methodologies. It has not only underpinned the structural analysis of structuralism, but also absorbed useful elements from the prevailing cognitive theories, endeavoring to probe into the psychological representation of knowledge structure, and to interpret the psychological mechanisms of the language itself. It is a valuable guide to linguistic research, foreign language teaching and cross-discipline research. Though Chomsky’s transformational generative linguistics is widely applied to the second language acquisition and foreign language teaching, it is seldom used to guide translation research. The present study aims to further explore and expound on the English-Chinese translation process in light of Chomsky’s transformational-generative concepts. It is found that, in Chomsky’s view, the generation of language undergoes transformations from deep structure to surface structure, a process that is common to all languages. Analogously, translation also experiences transformations, but rather the other way around, namely, from surface structure to deep structure at first, and from deep structure to surface structure in the end. This study simulates an English-Chinese translation model featuring a “step-by-step analyzer” and a “five-Chinese-character blender” as primary operators. It is hoped that the findings will shed light on the exploration of the nature of translation process, and the teaching and research.

One of the difficulties in translating The Man in the High Castle is the back translation of quotations from The Book of Changes. On the one hand, these quotations guide the development of the plot in the novel; on the other hand, they feature oriental culture. Therefore, their translation is of vital importance to the translation of the novel as a whole. Back-translation is a special topic in translation studies, whose principles, methods and functions are different from those of general translation. It is generally held by many translation scholars that restoring the original content is the best way for back-translation. Based on the practice of the author of this paper, it is argued that the use of back-translation is determined by the type of the text to be translated, the target content to be back-translated and the target reader. In this paper, the back translation is classified into two types. One is the translation of special terms, and the other is the translation of horizontal lines and hexagrams. The analysis of the examples shows that the back-translation embedded in the translation of science fiction can be done by means of liberal translation and restoration plus footnotes. In this way, the translated text can be more coherent and readable than it is done otherwise.

In the past studies of American ecological criticism, when researchers traced the origins of American regional writing thoughts, they often found their links with Indian myths, ancient Greek Gaia mythology, Chinese Taoism or Japanese Zen. There are not many studies on their Christian theological origins. The general impression of Christianity people have may play a part in this. This article focuses on the theological sources of American regional writing thoughts. The amount of regional writing in the United States is huge and contains many different types. The article sorts out three different types of regional writing ideas under the influence of Puritanism, transcendentalism and ecological theology. From these studies, we can see that the theological thoughts of Christianity can still lead to the writing of a large number of regional texts. Puritanism still exerts its influence on the writing of regional texts today and the regional writing influenced by transcendentalism and ecological theology provides important textual materials for the study of American regional writing thoughts.

By locating The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the autobiographical fiction of the adolescent James Joyce, in the postcolonial space, this paper starts from revealing the colonial discourse and “counter discourse” hidden in the Irish society in the early 20 ^thcentury. The focal point of this paper is the identity crisis of Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, which unveils the whole nation’s anxiety over integrating and reconstructing the Irish national identity. Based on the postcolonial theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, etc., the paper elaborates on the essentialist cultural identity constructed by religious institution and all kinds of nationalist movements. The study draws the following conclusions: Stephen refuses to be fixed in the essentialist position, which ignores the irreversible reality of multiple identities and cultural plurality. He embraces the hybrid identity and stays open to all the unknown, foreign and heterogeneous elements in life. Instead of breaking everything into dichotomy, hybrid identity often involves contradictory experiences and alterities, breaking the national boundaries, and defying the binary disciplines. In this way, the hierarchical colonial discourse is disrupted and destabilized. Meanwhile, a new possibility of narrative space and discursive space is created. Stephen’s choice of self-exile is not the denouncement of any “presence” in his identity but the embracement of the interplay of his “presences” in a larger world of hybridity. Although he left Ireland, Joyce kept the dialogue with his mother country all his life.

On the basis of the correlated literature research, this paper acquires the original data through interviews and semi-structured questionnaire. The results of the exploratory factor analysis on the basis of 232 questionnaires show that the procrastination determinants of non-English majors in their English learning can be divided into four types: task factor, autonomous learning factor, circumstantial factor and personality factor. The final dimension of the classification is confirmed by the confirmatory factor analysis through 261 questionnaires. Borrowing ideas from theories and results of research in domestic and foreign educational psychology field on learning procrastination, this paper makes a trial investigation and research on the procrastination behaviors in English learning in Chinese universities. We systematically evaluate the major causes of the procrastination behaviors of non-English majors in their English learning, and analyzes how these determinants affect their behaviors. Then the mechanism of intervention is established, which will promote the ability of autonomic learning, improve the learning environment and modulate positive emotions. Finally, it points out the limitation of the study on the research samples and research methods and discusses the prospect for the future research.

This paper aims to review Phase Theory: An Introduction, a book written by Barbara Citko and published in 2014. From the perspective of the Minimalist Program of Generative Grammar, this book provides a clear, fluent and panoramic overview of phase theory, in particular by dedicating to the discussion of the following aspects: relevant core concepts in the Minimalist Program, important mechanisms and operations in phase theory (including Phase Impenetrability Condition, Multiple Spell-Out and Feature Inheritance), phasehood diagnostics, classic phases, controversies of other phases, variation in phasehood, and the relationships between phases and interfaces. Closely connected to the Strong Minimalist Thesis, and with the ability of phase heads to determine spell-out, the ability of phase heads to serve as probes and the requirement that movement out of phase proceeds through phase edges, phase theory provides practical operations for narrow syntactic computation to interact with interface systems, and concomitantly helps to reduce the burden of syntactic derivation and improve computation efficiency. Many issues concerning phase theory, however, still need further studies. In spite of some weaknesses, this book indeed shows where phases come from, what they can do, and where they are going.