This paper defines language services and language-service discipline according to the current developments in the language-service industry and discipline, and proposes three viewpoints. First, China is large regarding the size of its language-service market, but is not yet strong enough. Second, China should accelerate the development of the language-service discipline in order to promote the transition from being a large country to becoming a powerful one. Third, universities should cultivate more qualified language-service professionals to create a country that is powerful in terms of providing language services.

As it incorporates information technology, translation competence, project management, and market management technologies, localization is an important part of the language-service industry. More than 20 years ago, universities in developed countries, such as in Europe and the United States, introduced majors in localization. This paper first provides a comprehensive analysis of the situation pertaining to professional education in language localization in European and American universities, followed by a discussion of the teaching objectives, talent-development orientation, curriculum design, and the professional development of faculty members with regard to a localization major in Chinese universities. Based on these discussions, some suggestions for the construction of a localization major in Chinese universities are also proposed.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of developments in China and abroad in terms of language-service standardization from such perspectives as organizational settings, issued standards, and developing standards. International language-service standardization systems include the following features: (1) wide involvement, unified management; (2) relatively comprehensive system; (3) rigorous standard development procedure and regular review; and (4) detailed examination indicators, high enforceability, and direct certification availability. The features of the Chinese language service standardization system are summarized in this study as follows: (1) the standardization body is not run for the language-service sector; (2) the existing language service standards focus on some bottom-line requirements for basic activities; (3) standards are developed in formalistic ways and are seldom updated; and (4) the indicators for assessment and the bases of assessments are absent and/or difficult for implementation and certification. Based on the above findings, the following suggestions for improvement are indicated: (1) to develop and regularly review standards according to actual needs; (2) to create a well-planned and comprehensive standardization system; (3) to include more measurable indicators in Chinese standards; and (4) to establish a corresponding standards body to participate actively in international language service standardization activities.

The defining characteristics of legal services in foreign affairs determine the compound and hybrid nature of legal talents for foreign affairs; that is, being proficient in legal English terminology and having expertise in legal English proficiency are the underlying core qualities. We maintain that undergraduate college education should adopt legal English as the entry-level target, and should consolidate the foundation of legal talents for foreign affairs. Therefore, it is imperative to develop multiple training paths targeted at legal talents of different types accommodated to such needs in legal-talent training as “expertise-oriented”, “language-oriented”, and “mass-oriented”. These training paths may include “mismatched training”, “dual-degree training”, “micro-credential training”, and so on, with the teaching of legal English as the focus.

The translation of legal texts is an extremely complex communication activity across languages, cultures, and legal systems, and always involves the participants’ selection, as well as the adaptation of and interaction with social, cultural, and cognitive factors. Based on an overview of previous research on context theory, this study proposes the multidimensional context adaptation of legal text translation, and discusses the concrete application of this theoretical framework in the translation of legal texts in detail. According to multidimensional contextual adaptation theory, the success or failure of the translation of a legal text depends largely on the translator’s adaptive choices in the context of cultural globalization, which means that translators must actively adapt to all the elements related to language selection, such as the language context, the cultural context, the language users, the physical world, the psychological world, and the social world, and must select the best target language in the dynamic translation process to reproduce the semantic connotations and legal cultural information contained in the original text effectively, and to achieve dual equivalence between the original text and the target text in terms of the language function and the legal function. The present study shows that multidimensional context adaptation provides a relatively complete theoretical framework for the study of the translation of legal texts, and is also significant in terms of guiding the evaluation of the quality of translations and translation practice in legal texts.

Legislative texts set the standards for the social behavior of people and stipulate the evidence necessary for judging illegal behaviors. Legislative texts, as normative texts among many legal texts, are of great significance for establishing social norms. The language in legislative texts is part of a precise legal language system, which is highly professional, formal, normative, logical, and rigorous. Among the numerous translations of legal texts, the translation of legislative texts is of universal academic research value. Based on adaptation theory and the translation perspective of the theory, this study takes Tort Law of the People’s Republic of China, which is closely related to civil rights, is of relatively greater academic reference value, as the corpus and all of the translation examples are selected from the website http://www.pkulaw.com. Using the research methods of example analysis and translation criticism under the guidance of adaptation theory, this article discusses the Chinese-English translation of legislative texts, and explores ways of applying the three compliance strategies of “form adaptation to meaning” “part adaptation to the whole” and “selection adaptation to the intention” in legal translation in the hope that the analysis will provide some guidance to the translation of legal texts, particularly legislative texts.

This paper reviews and comments on relevant research on the relationship between discourse functions and grammatical expressions. It focuses mainly on four theoretical issues to differentiate and discuss the important viewpoints in the relevant research, which can be roughly divided into two stages, from the 1960s to the 1990s, and from the 1990s to the present. First, with regard to prophase and anaphase, the change in the core concepts is reflected in the stronger awareness of identifying the descriptive category and the comparative concept. Second, with regard to the basic structures of discourse functions, it has gradually been realized that dichotomy or polysemy is not the primary reason for circularity. Third, by focusing on the acorresponding relationship between discourse functions and grammatical expressions, researchers have identified the multifunctionality of grammatical markers, which do not have a one-to-one correspondence with discourse functions. In addition to their multifunctional nature, discourse functions are expressed in diverse forms in the larger discourse environment via interactions with other relevant factors. Fourth, the status of clauses does not directly determine the discourse functions. These are mainly related to the distribution of the events in the subordinate clause and in the first clause, which do not only provide background information. It is also necessary to avoid circularity in this respect. Based on previous studies, we should strengthen the research on the diachronic evolution of the correspondence between discourse functions and grammatical expressions in Chinese.

The Cardiff Grammar is an important model in systemic functional linguistics. Recently, research related to the Cardiff Grammar has been gaining momentum both at home and abroad. However, the developments and research paradigms of the Cardiff Grammar still appear to be unfamiliar to scholars. Based on a careful reading of the original references to the Cardiff Grammar, this paper aims to investigate the developmental stages in and the research paradigms of the Cardiff Grammar systematically. The findings reveal that: 1) the developmental process of the Cardiff Grammar can be divided into the embryonic stage, the formative stage, and the maturing stage; and 2) three research paradigms are embodied, namely the bidirectionality of meaning and form, the integration of individual cognition and social interaction, and the unity of theoretical-generative and text-descriptive.

Conceptual Metonymy: Methodological, and Descriptive Issues (2018), edited by Olga Blanco-Carrión, Antonio Barcelona, and Rossella Pannain, suggests a more systematic research approach to metonymy based on the creation of a metonymy database. This paper introduces the three main contents in this book, namely issues in the design and/or implementation of a metonymy database, some general properties of metonymy, and the ubiquity of metonymy in languages. This paper also makes a brief comment about the main creativities of the book. As the latest achievement in metonymy theory, this book not only proposes methods of systematic research for metonymy, but also raises many new issues that should be the focus of academia.