College English Writing Instruction from the Perspective of Text Linguistics

This paper is designed to explore whether the theory of text linguistics,especially the knowledge of cohesion,coherence and cohesive devices could be applied in college English writing teaching to help improve students’writing abilities.Besides,the author puts forward some suggestions for both English teachers and learners.

Court Sight Translation From Text-Linguistic Approach

Court interpreting as a type of dialogue or liaison interpreting has recently drawn an increasing level of attention in a variety of disciplines, including legal science, applied linguistics, and translation studies. Amongst discussions relevant to court interpreting, the area of sight translation has yet to be emphasized, despite its importance to the outcome of a trial. In this study I first had observations of court interpreting activities on several occasions. Based on these observations, I then formulated a questionnaire and distributed it to 86 interpreters in two training workshops organized by the Taiwan High Court in 2013. The key findings are as follows： most interpreters consider sight translation to be more difficult than other forms of interpretation in the courtroom; while conducting sight translation many interpreters pause in order to seek clarification or are interrupted; most interpreters would prefer the judge or the prosecutor to orally summarize the text to be sight translated; and, after ＂negotiation,＂ most practitioners tend to lower the level of formality when dealing with a text written in a formal style. These findings imply that interpreters conducting sight translation render a translation through ＂negotiation＂ with other participants of the activity; this negotiation can be seen as an attempt to build a ＂context＂ from the perspective of liaison interpreting. This study intends to raise the awareness of court interpreters regarding a number of key issues in sight translation, and the results are hoped to be conducive to the future study of other types of liaison interpreting and interpreting as a whole.

Sources of Otto Jespersen＇s Sound Symbolism From Various Disciplines： A Case of Linguistic Historiography

Despite its role in literature, especially in poetics, sound symbolism does not traditionally enjoy a high esteem in linguistics. Ever since the scientific study of language was revolutionized by the Swiss structuralist pioneer Ferdinand de Saussure, sound symbolism tended to be restricted to some peripheral linguistic phenomena. The present essay is an interpretation of first-hand texts. It explores the development of the linguistic idea of sound symbolism scattered in the both linguistic and non-linguistic texts published in German, French, English and other languages. These texts are found to suggest that Saussure was not the only scholar interested in this sound-sense relationship in his age, nor was his idea of arbitrariness the final word on it. The author concludes that a study on the history of sound symbolism has to be accomplished with a trans-disciplinary perspective and the support of multi-lingual texts.