Tertiary foreign-language education, particularly college English, is being increasingly challenged by the national requirement to cultivate innovative talents. As college English is oriented toward liberal education and is committed to improving the humanistic quality of university students, it is unable to adapt to the new era in which scientific knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate and university students need to be able to make informed judgments in political matters that involve science and technology. We suggest that more emphasis should be placed on education in scientific literacy instead of neglecting or even being hostile toward it. For example, efforts must be made revolutionize the teaching content of college English with the aim of improving the scientific literacy of university students in areas such as scientific knowledge, information literacy, critical-thinking ability, and problem-solving ability.

In China, the commercial act of the Pre-Plan Funeral Arrangement (PPFA) is a new genre of death discourse that has been promoted in the past five years. This research examines the heteroglossia and positioning of six senior PPFA contract signers in Beijing. A group interview was conducted to identify purchasing decisions, and the data were analyzed based on positioning theory and appraisal theory. Multiple voices were found concerning issues such as the (non-) verbalization of death, the (non-) necessity of pre-planning, interdependence versus independence, and longevity versus life quality. Through the heteroglossic interactions, the signers constructed a major position of autonomous and dignified funeral planners, yet simultaneously implied the feeling of being helplessly constrained. Based on this, a PART model of dialogical positioning is proposed. The idea and form of funeral pre-planning advocates individual rights, and challenges the transmission of family and cultural heritages in China.

This paper examines the construction of attitudes toward life and death in the generic hybridity of pre-plan funeral arrangement contracts. The pre-plan funeral arrangement contracts, including agreements and product manuals from an insurance company and a private funeral company, were selected as research data. Swale’s (1990) move-step approach of genre analysis has been adopted to analyze the generic structure, the features of the genre, and the construction of attitudes toward life and death. The findings revealed that the pre-plan funeral arrangement contracts shared a similar generic structure although differences were found at the step level. The pre-plan funeral agreement contracts determine what will happen to a person’s mortal remains in form of commercial contracts that have both commercial and humanistic characteristics. This is a new genre in China, which reflects and constructs the values of autonomy, death planning, and death control.

Poetry, as a highly artistic genre of writing, is generally considered to be difficult to translate. To date, research on the translation of poetry has mainly focused on the textual level and not on the non-textual level. However, non-textual purposes can have a significant impact on poem translation as translators have to take conciseness and artistry of language into consideration in the process of translation. Based on the theory of non-textual purposes proposed by Professor Cao Minglun(2007), this paper discusses the impact of non-textual purposes on translation by analyzing and comparing the two English versions of Shi Jing produced by James Legge(2014) and Xu Yuanchong(1994), respectively. By observing translation purposes from the perspective of the translators’ identities and the channels or methods used to realize these translation purposes, it can be seen that translators will unavoidably be influenced by non-textual purposes, including those of politics, culture and religion in the process of interpreting the source text and producing the target text poems, and will integrate these factors into their translations. This can be seen in both James Legge’s and in Xu Yuanchong’s translations of Shi Jing, as the examples, annotations, prefaces, and analyses suggest. This paper offers a comparatively scientific definition of the term non-textual purposes, and aims to expand the scope of research on the translation of poetry from the non-textual perspective.

In 1809, Kleist, a German dramatist and novelist, wrote a series of political articles for the magazine Germania, which he had been planning to publish since the end of the 1800s, with the purpose of providing propaganda for the Anti-Napoleonic Wars that were started by the German countries and patriots. These articles are specific outcomes of a particular historical background, namely national wars against foreign aggression; thus, these articles should be interpreted against this political and historical background. By discussing the political situations and the historical events that were taking place when Germania was written, this article reveals different ways of realizing German national self-identity and methods for its consolidation that were presented in Germania according to three aspects: 1) The modern theory of geopolitics posited by Friedrich Ratzel in the second half of the nineteenth century; 2) the system of friend-enemy distinction from the beginning of twentieth century proposed by Carl Schmitt; and 3) the anticipation of the theory of total war raised by Erich Ludendorff during the First World War. The article concludes that, in Kleist’s Germania, national self-identity and the liberation war combined to create the two essential factors for the national freedom of the German people. Thus, this article can assist researchers and readers to have a better understanding of Kleist’s authorship, his views of the nation and the particular style expressed in his works.

Formulaic sequences (FSs) account for a large amount of language use, yet they are one of the most difficult aspects to master when learning a second language (L2), as it is difficult for learners to select and use FSs in a native-like way. Studies of FSs acquisition have been conducted from different perspectives, and the findings have involved the discussion of a variety of related topics, including the phonetic properties, generative mechanisms, and modes of cognition. However, little attention has been paid to the exploration of the socio-cultural properties of FSs or its modes of emergence and transmission. This study, which adopted a linguistic memetics perspective, analyzed the properties of FSs as linguistic memetics and their different realizations as strong and weak memes. By further exploring the social contextualization of FSs, we found that FSs are learnable and that the learning of FSs has to comply with the periodicity of language communication, while also taking the social meaning of FSs into consideration.

The study examines the influence of the second language (L2) motivational self system on the students' use of motivational regulation strategies and motivated behavior by surveying 302 non-English major college students. The results of the correlation and multiple regression analyses of the data indicate that the three aspects of the L2 motivational self system, namely the ideal L2 self, the ought-to L2 self, and the L2 learning experience, were all correlated significantly and positively with the use of motivational regulation strategies and motivated behavior. The L2 motivational self system, as a whole, is a significant predictor of all the eight motivational regulation strategies and of motivated behavior. Individually, the ideal L2 self is a strong predictor of all the eight motivational regulation strategies and motivated behavior, while the ought-to L2 self can not significantly predict the use of interest enhancement and volitional control or motivated behavior. The L2 learning experience is found to be the strongest predictor of motivated behavior and the strongest predictor for the use of five motivational regulation strategies—interest enhancement, mastery self-talk, self-reward, volitional control, and self-efficacy enhancement. The L2 motivational self system can well explain students' use of motivational regulation strategies and their motivated behavior; therefore, teachers should aim to create a motivating classroom environment for students, and assist them to construct and optimize the L2 self.

Researching Translation and Interpreting was published by Routledge in 2016. With its broad research vision and interdisciplinary research paradigm, this book has widely absorbed and borrowed the research results of many related disciplines such as sociology, culture, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, history, and education. It provides a comprehensively constructed roadmap and methodology for translation and interpreting studies, and provides readers with more complete and updated research perspectives and methods than did previous works. Thus, it can be considered to be an encyclopedia of interdisciplinary translation and interpreting studies. The book has important reference value and offers significant guidelines for enriching and perfecting the theories and methods of translation and interpreting studies and promoting the development of translatology. This paper introduces the content of this book and analyzes its academic characteristics and contributions, as well as its limitations, to provide a reference and implications for domestic translation and interpreting studies.