As the essence of the Chinese language, four-character idioms are the crystallization of traditional use by the Chinese people. The integrity of their meaning and the solidification of their structure seem to be conventionalized. However, with the dynamic evolution of the Chinese language, its four-character idioms should not be considered to be the unchangeable “antique” in language expressions, but as the unique “living fossil” of traditional Chinese culture, since these idioms have already developed with prominent elasticity and enormous potentiality for change. Grounded on the view put forward by Wang Wenbin that Chinese language possesses the trait of spatiality, this paper focuses on the special and complicated language unit of Chinese four-character idioms. What has been observed is that four-character idioms are characterized by chunkiness and discreteness. Their chunkiness can be revealed by their inner components being orderly spread, parallel combined and chunkily integrated when they are componentially analyzed, and being independently lumpy, relatively juxtaposed and flexibly disconnected while used as a whole in a sentence. Their discreteness can be demonstrated by the feature of elasticity: being separable, insertable, order-exchangeable and substitutable. The chunkiness and the discreteness actually accommodate each other and interact with each other as both cause and effect, thereby making the trait of the spatiality of Chinese quite conspicuous.

As the advocator of the “Translator Behavior Study” and the “Translator Behavior Criticism” theory, the author discusses the significance of the Translator Behavior Study and the conscience of school, the basic contents and the approaches, responses from the academic circles to the Translator Behavior Criticism, and the prospects for the Translator Behavior Study and the Translator Behavior Criticism. This article holds the view that the Translator Behavior Study is sustainable and the Translator Behavior Criticism theory needs to be improved to contribute more to Translation Criticism. The relationship between “Translator Behavior Study” and “Translator Behavior Criticism” is that of the research field and its theoretical tool. As a theoretical perspective is required to make Translator Behavior Study more descriptive and accountable, the theory of Translator Behavior Criticism theory comes into being. Obviously, clarifying their relationship is helpful for the forthcoming researchers to broaden their horizons and deepen their research in this field.

In Translation Behavior Criticism, Professor Zhou Lingshun adopts the perspective of translator criticism, steering the research away from the imbalanced unilateral view either on the closed text research or on diversified cultural elements, and back to the focus on translators as well as the text in relevance. Incorporating the essence of both traditional Chinese translation theories and multiple research achievements of the West, this theory puts emphasis on building up a connection between the translators’ ‘will’ and the outcome of their conduct (the text), a relationship that is formed in the process when many participating elements exert their influence. Translation criticism means through dynamic description, the rationality of the translators’ behavior and their translation products will be evaluated, which offers proper solutions to many specific problems in the practice of translation criticism. In the spirit of openness and inclusiveness, this theory aims to serve as a bridge to link Chinese and Western translation theories. It is hoped that through theoretical reflection, further improvement, and practice, this newly-developed modern Chinese translation theory will eventually prove itself to the rest of the world, making its share of contribution in this field.

In the 1950s, behavioral psychology found itself in a predicament. However, translation subjectivity has remained a hot topic ever since the 1980s, which has resulted in the profound exploration into the translator action or behavior. As it is, this paper tends to use translation action rather than translation behavior due to the fact that translation behavior has turned out to be a specific term used in the western psychological research context. Actually, translator action has distinctive characteristics of the times and contains a number of innate contradictions, of which the autonomy of translator action and its normalization become interrelated and unsolvable because of some intrinsic and extrinsic factors of subjectivity. Based on the theory of translation norms, this paper argues that translators may act intentionally or unintentionally, reasonably or unreasonably in a particular social context, and in the meantime they have the innate tendency to pursuit their own autonomy. However, it has long been held that translator action is governed by the external situation, which overlooks the fact that translators consciously as well as subconsciously intend to free themselves from those constraints. Therefore, with respect to the translator’s subjectivity, translators should keep in mind the systematic translation norms, which helps modulate effectively the degree of autonomy they may have in the process of translation.

Translation, with the goal of achieving human communication, is a cross-cultural activity of ideas exchange and social production through the medium of various systems of language symbols. Translation as an activity of social production has two attributes of being institutionalized and market-driven. The two attributes are illustrated in the form of institutionalized translation and of market-driven translation, performed respectively by institutionalized translators and market-driven translators. In recent years, Chinese scholar Professor Zhou Lingshun proposes a theoretical framework of translator’s behavioral criticism to observe translation activity from both within and without the text. This framework emphasizes the social identity of the translator on the basis of traditional text analysis. From the perspective of the “truth-seeking-utility-attaining” model of continuum of evaluation towards translator’s behavior, this paper probes into the differences illustrated through comparing the two translated versions of Xue Ye and Ci Lu Hu De You Yu by Duanmu Hongliang. The two versions are translated by the institutionalized translator Sidney Shapiro and the market-driven translator Howard Goldblatt, who are representative of the two types of translators. Through comparison, the paper analyzes the inclination of lingual truth-seeking and social utility-attaining so as to reveal the root underlying their behavior of translation.

Based on the transitivity system in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the paper investigates the news reports about One Belt One Road Initiative in Lianhe Zaobao, a mainstream Chinese newspaper in Singapore. It aims to explore how China and One Belt One Road Initiative are reported by the mainstream Chinese media in Singapore. The research results show that the mainstream Chinese media in Singapore report China and One Belt One Road Initiative with focus mainly on actional, relational, psychological, and communicative processes. By depicting the roles of China and Singapore as the knower, the doer and the communicator and describing One Belt One Road Initiative as the medium of joint action, they illustrate the great influence China and One Belt One Road Initiative will have on the development of Singapore and other ASEAN countries. Their reports express the great value Singapore places on its cooperation with China in many areas, which reflects the support of Singapore’s Chinese community for China and One Belt One Road Initiative and their approval of Sino-Singaporean cooperation, thus serving as a bridge between China and Singapore.

The study of syntactic complexity in L2 writing has been one of the hot topics in applied linguistics and second language acquisition in recent years. Both Chinese and overseas scholars have conducted a series of empirical studies employing different measures from different perspectives and great achievements have been obtained. This paper attempts to review the current research situation of syntactic complexity in L2 writing in terms of research content, research methods, research perspectives and existing problems of the study of syntactic complexity in L2 writing. In addition, current trends of research on syntactic complexity and the characteristics of the teaching of syntactic complexity in L2 writing are briefly stated. It is not difficult to see the nature of L2 syntactic complexity is multi-faceted, multi-level and multi-dimensional, and it requires serious attention to research design and the use of appropriate statistical analyses in the future. The multi-faceted, multi-level and multi-dimensional nature of L2 syntactic complexity provides a new perspective and implication for L2 writing pedagogy. The meaning dimension of linguistic complexity might help researchers further establish and develop multi-dimensional measures combining linguistic form, function and meaning, taking the learners’ language development and variation into account, and, at the same time, pay attention to assessing learners’ language proficiency level and writing quality.

The American playwright Eugene O’Neill is known as a sentimental and complicated person whose dramas, based on his personalized repentance and tragic narrative as well as the individual’s inner conflicts, interrogate the sinking souls and show his concern over the people’s life crisis and spiritual alienation and seek in the chaos and abyss of human nature a home for the soul. By probing into his life and interpreting his dramas, the author of the paper attempts to extricate from the previous preconceived judgment in text analysis and hopes to search for the underlying motivation of O’Neill’s spiritual trauma and soul narrative so as to achieve an interactive and objective interpretation of O’Neill’s dramas by combining O’Neill’s personal experience with his individual life narrative. With the research, the author puts forward that O’Neill’s narrative is ethical and inseparable from his religious belief. O’Neill has spent his whole life struggling for and pursuing spiritual support and expressed in his dramas the suffering, hesitation and contradiction brought about by his abandonment of the religious faith, and the redemption of the sinking soul. To have a profound insight into O’Neill’s spiritual pilgrim may help us to better understand his ethical narrative and ethical selection, and in particular to see a true O’Neill and his religious complex through his literary writings.

Based on the data of in-depth interviews and classroom observation, this study selects five subjects, both male and female, varying in age and academic title, and finds that young and middle-aged College English teachers in the application-oriented university tend to undergo three phases in their academic growth, changing from knowledge imparters to research-oriented scholars. The comprehensive analysis shows that poor research awareness, inadequate theoretical knowledge, failure in research project application, and slim chances of publishing research papers have devastating negative impact on teachers'enthusiasm and initiative for academic research. From the dual perspectives of both teachers and the application-oriented universities, this paper comes up with suggestions such as enriching teachers'knowledge, raising their research awareness, broadening their research horizons through various academic platforms, creating a learning community, and pooling their research strengths. By means of case study, this paper explores the academic growth of young and middle-aged College English teachers in China’s application-oriented universities, attempting to find out the hidden reasons for teachers'extrinsic behavior, with the hope of providing some useful feedbacks and data for the relevant educational decision-makers, so as to contribute to the professional development of college English teachers.

Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology, a cross-disciplinary anthology published by John Benjamins Publishing in 2015, is a joint effort of translation scholars and imagologists in recent years. It addresses a number of issues and problems in translation studies from the perspective of imagology. The sixteen articles, subdivided into four parts, i.e., translation and historical trajectories of images, translation and the construction of hetero-images, translation and the reconstruction of hetero-images, and translation and auto-images, discuss how national and ethical images are (re)constructed through translation in different periods of history. By studying a number of translation cases across various media and genre such as film, news and prose, the anthology focuses on the synergy between translation activities and image (re)construction on a wide range of levels and highlights previously obscure areas of overlapping between translation and image (re)construction. The work brings to the fore all kinds of endeavors that translators have made in image transfer and reconstruction and thus puts forward the “imagological approach” as a significant new approach and “image” as a key domain of research in translation studies. Generally, the interconnection between translation studies and imagology is expected to help to remove their respective blind spots and extend the field of inquiry of translation studies.