Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

A Historical Comparative Study on the Annual Reports of Chinese Public Companies

Chaowang Ren — 2023-09-05

The great change in human social history will certainly lead to a change in language use. Meanwhile, the diachronic study of language change can also reflect the historical change in society. Based on the principles of corpus construction, this paper uses AntConc and other corpus retrieval tools to conduct a diachronic comparative analysis of the discourse variation of management discussion and analysis based on the self-built corpus of management discussion and analysis and combines the research results of diachronic linguistics and sociolinguistics to analyze the discourse variation of management discussion and analysis mainly from three levels of word frequency, keywords and collocates. We go deep into the text and make a diachronic comparative analysis of the discussion and analysis of the management based on the dialectical relationship between discourse and society, showing the use of language in different times, revealing the pattern of language change, and supporting the development and change of society. Through the description, analysis and summary of the research results, the author believes that the corpus-based diachronic language change reveals the nature of language change reflecting social change, provides information for in-depth study of the complex causes of language variation, and also provides material for the standardization of language expression.

A Study on the Translation of Mao Zedong's Poetic Dynamic Images from the Perspective of Image Schema Theory

Haowen Liang — 2023-06-18

Mao Zedong's poetry is highly valued for its literary and ideological significance, as it is rich in allusions and image that reflect his patriotism and philosophical thinking. Additionally, his poems have also been translated by renowned translators such as Xu Yuanzhong. To better translate Mao Zedong's poetry, this paper focuses on the analysis of the dynamic images with movement connotations in his poetry, and makes use of the image schema theory of cognitive linguistics to compare and analyze the images and corresponding translations of relevant verses, in order to explore the gains and losses of different translations and summarize translation methods for Chinese classical poetry, thus helping Chinese culture to go global.

A ChatGPT-driven Study of Translating and Post-editing Chinese Enterprise Publicity Materials

Junchao Wang — 2023-07-13

The China Import and Export Fair (a.k.a. Canton Fair), the first promotion platform for China’s foreign trade, is a key topic for academic and business discussions. Driven by ChatGPT, the present study first constructs a bilingual database concerning the Canton Fair, and then compares the ChatGPT-generated and human-translated multimodal texts such as exhibition invitation letters and main visual images of the Fair. One of the findings is that artificial intelligence can help translate in a top-down way, that is, from a macroscopic and three-dimensional knowledge framework to language usage at a microscopic level, which is different from the previous bottom-up translation practice, teaching, and research. In addition, the comparison of different translations can also provide empirical rules and insights for writing, translating, and post-editing enterprise publicity materials in the new artificial intelligence era.