Research methods in translation studies are derived but distinct from traditional humanistic research methods. Research methods in translation studies fall into three levels in the hierarchy of all methods: philosophical methods at the macro level, general methods at the meso level and specific methods at the micro level, each of which belongs to corresponding methodological systems. Philosophical methods guide and constrain the other two types. General methods enrich philosophical ones from the bottom to the top and expand specific ones from the top to the bottom. Philosophical methods include universal connection methods, development methods and contradiction analysis methods. General methods consist of two sub-types: dialectical thinking methods include analytical and synthetic methods, inductive and deductive methods, qualitative and quantitative methods, a combination of macroscopic and microscopic methods, methods of consistency between history and logic, and abstract-to-concrete methods; systems science methods include those adopted in systems theory, information theory, cybernetics, dissipation theory, synergy theory and mutation theory. Specific methods, which are the largest in number, can be directly operated and used.

Legal translation in China began in the late Qing Dynasty, and developed over the following five periods: the embryonic period, the exploration period, the transition period, the development period, and the perfection period. The importance of legal translation became increasingly prominent after the 18^th National Congress of the CPC, and attention from people from all walks of life has continued to increase. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the problems in legal translation and to eliminate any misunderstandings. Due to the central government’s emphasis on improving international communication, we must pay attention to the leading role of legal translation, particularly its independent value. In the future, we should do a solid job in the teaching of legal translation and accelerate the process of promoting the standardization of legal translation in order to improve the quality and level of legal translation, to better serve the national strategy, to construct the international discourse system regarding the rule of law, to strengthen the capacity for international communication, and to tell the story of China’s rule of law. We can take the communication of the rule of law as the starting point to create an image of China that is ruled by law in order to gain the trust of the international community and to make more people eager to listen to the story of China.

Ultra-local syntactic structures are very common crosslinguistically and there is no consensus on how to analyze them in a unified way. Parallel merge (PM) theory provides such an opportunity. The paper firstly introduces the main idea of this theory and key factors involved in the derivation of sentences given PM. It is then shown that the four cross-linguistic ultra-local structures can be novely and successfully accounted for by following the PM approach, including right-node raising constructions, amalgamated sentences, serial verb constructions, and appositive constructions. Lastly, it is demonstrated that the ultra-local phenomena in Mandarin Chinese, such as the appositional construction, can also be explained using this approach.

The present study aimed to investigate the functional category deficits, including the Tense Phrase (TP), the Complementizer Phrase (CP), and the sub-projections FocusP and FiniteP, in a Chinese speaker with agrammatic aphasia during his recovery process. The results revealed that the patient had the greatest difficulty with the TP, with a notable deficit in referring to the past tense. His sensitivity to the polarity items was severely impaired but had steadily been recovered. Although the data from Chinese agrammatism evinced the cross-linguistic demonstration, our results did not support the Tree Pruning Hypothesis. This study provided evidence for the theoretical analysis of the verbal le₁ and the sentence-final le₂. This study also shed light on the distinctions between finiteness and non-finiteness in the Chinese language.

In recent years, due to the rise of cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, particularly corpus linguistics and phraseology, has led to formulaic language in second language (hereafter referred to as L2 formulaic language) becoming an important field in second language research. For this paper, we retrieved academic papers that mainly focused on L2 formulaic language from the Web of Science (WoS) database, and employed CiteSpace’s literature information visualization technology. The quantitative analysis aimed to objectively and comprehensively trace and analyze the development process, trending topics, and leading subjects in research on L2 formulaic language from 1999 to 2023. The research findings indicated that L2 formulaic language research exhibited an increasing trend of continuous growth. The core research areas encompass the four disciplinary fields of corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and applied linguistics. These fields involve various research topics related to L2 formulaic language, including its structure and distribution, representation and processing, usage and functions, and the acquisition and teaching of L2 formulaic language. Based on a bibliometric analysis, this paper aims to clarify the development trends in the field of research on L2 formulaic language over the past 25 years within the academic community. It provides a visual and comprehensive literature guide for future, in-depth research on L2 formulaic language.

Wang Rongpei is a renowned contemporary translator of Chinese classics. He has translated more than 60 Chinese classical works in his lifetime, among which eight works, including Shijing, have been selected for inclusion in the Library of Chinese Classics due to their outstanding contributions to the English translation of Chinese classics. Based on the English-Chinese parallel corpus of Shijing, WordSmith was used to investigate Wang Rongpei’s translation style on both the lexical and the syntactic levels by comparing his English translation of Shijing to the English versions by Legge, Pound, and Xu Yuanchong. This study discusses both T-type and S-type translator styles, based on which the interpretation of the motivations is proposed. While reflecting the translator’s style directly by using the statistical data of corpus, exploring the translator’s style by considering the source text is helpful for revealing the essence of translation objectively and comprehensively.

With regard to the translation of classical Chinese poetry, translators with different purposes and cultural background, in different times and regions, have formed different ideas about translation and have proposed different translation paths and methods. Wai-lim Yip, a well-known scholar of Chinese origin, proposed and constructed his comparative poetics with the “model” as the core concept. When translating classical Chinese poetry, he implemented his poetic theory, established his thoughts about the translation of classical Chinese poetry. Wai-lim Yip’s translation thoughts reveal his cultural awareness and translation appeals, highlight attributes and features of classical Chinese poetry as well as Chinese poetics, and provide a distinctive research perspective and translation paths in translating classical Chinese poetry. Based on a close study of two of his representative translated works, from three perspectives, namely views on source text understanding and interpretation, concepts and paths for the target text production, and effects of target readers’ acceptance, the thesis analyzes and elaborates Wai-lim Yip’s thoughts about translation, his comparative poetics manifested in his translated poetry, as well as the accommodation and integration of his poetic thoughts and translation thoughts. This study has a positive meaning to the practice and the theoretical study of the translation of classical Chinese poetry and the study of the construction and acceptance of Chinese literature abroad.

Cao Yu is considered the founder of modern Chinese drama; he wrote and adapted a total of 13 dramatic works during his lifetime, most of which have been translated into English. These English translations have mainly been published as stand-alone books, with a few appearing in journals or being included in anthologies of translations, involving 19 translators from both China and the West. This paper reviews the English translations of Cao Yu’s plays in terms of the translators and their translations, with a particular focus on the translation of four of his masterpieces, Thunderstorm, The Sunrise, The Wilderness and Peking Man. This study revealed that the English translations of Cao Yu’s works were characterized by slow translation updates, outdated language use in translations, and a lack of translators, which has affected the dissemination and acceptance of Cao Yu’s plays in the English-speaking world to a certain extent. This paper can provide references for translation practitioners, and is important not only for the research on Cao Yu and drama translation studies, but also for the promotion and dissemination of Chinese literature across the world.

This paper analyzes the narratives in early Native American writing, based on the concept of imagined communities which acts as an emotional catalyst, fusing conflicts caused by ethnic disparities to examine the potential of complex identities. By identifying two dimensions of early Native American writing—the emotion expressed in the literary works and the historical presence in space which strengthens this emotional effect—the members of the community complete the construction of identity. This process of identification forms a contradictory but coexisting tension in the new continent of North America. The narratives reveal the role of print-languages and simultaneity-along-time in founding the imagined community.

As a new NLP machine learning model with an extensive ability to produce content, ChatGPT has the potential to transform traditional translation teaching models. However, ChatGPT may also decrease students’ ability to learn autonomously, may undermine teacher-student relationships, damage academic integrity and knowledge security, and lead to ethical and ideological risks. In order to address the challenges and to make full use of ChatGPT in the teaching of translation, it is necessary to change the traditional way of teaching, to reform the teaching process, to improve students’ ability to learn autonomously, to increase education in translation ethics, to control ideological risks, and to enhance teachers and students’ digital literacy.

This paper, based on the discussions of examples in English and Chinese metonymy, outlines the latest development of the research on conceptual metonymy and prospects its future research path and directions. First, this paper discusses the transfer of research paradigm from rhetoric to cognitive linguistics. Second, it discusses the latest development of metonymy studies, such as the studies on metonymic triggers and the functions of metonymy. Third, it puts forward some suggestions such as doing the contrastive studies between English and Chinese metonymy, and applying the research results to translation and language teaching & learning for the future studies.