College English teaching in China has long focused on importing cultures of English countries while neglecting to enhance students’English competence in home culture.The present research aims to investigate Chinese n...College English teaching in China has long focused on importing cultures of English countries while neglecting to enhance students’English competence in home culture.The present research aims to investigate Chinese non-English major undergraduates’competence in translating Chinese cultural items into English and the significant predictors of such competence.With a test and a questionnaire as research instruments,this study was conducted to assess 82 undergraduates’ability to translate three different levels of Chinese culture-specific items into English and explored the factors which might have affected the students’home culture translation ability.The results show that the participants did well in translating the surface layer cultural items,but their performance in sub-surface and deep layer culture translation tasks was far from being satisfactory.It was also found that students had positive attitudes towards Chinese culture and were willing to learn to express Chinese culture in English,but their English learning motivation in general was not strong enough,and they were not given much input on Chinese culture in their English class.Students’Chinese cultural knowledge and their awareness of the importance of learning Chinese culture in English were found to be the two significant factors that can predict their performance in the translation tasks.These findings have implications for the teaching of culture and cross-cultural communications in EFL classes.展开更多
The recent years have witnessed increasing opportunities for people from various cultural backgrounds to communicate with each other, which is naturally based on a general grasp of cultural knowledge and communicative...The recent years have witnessed increasing opportunities for people from various cultural backgrounds to communicate with each other, which is naturally based on a general grasp of cultural knowledge and communicative techniques in cross-cultural settings. However, there often exist cultural clashes in such cases, especially between Chinese and English speaking people, which are deeply rooted in the wide differences in their languages and thinking modes. Indeed, this also serves to be an important part in the acquisition of the English culture for Chinese students in the current educational climate. The paper is intended to provide a contrastive analysis of the major cultural differences between Chinese and English speaking people in their thinking modes in three aspects of the descriptive versus the formal, the concrete versus the abstract, and the practical versus the logical form the linguistic perspective. And the paper comes to the conclusion that a general understanding of these significant differences may enable Chinese-speaking people and English-speaking people to establish a more efficient communication with each other.展开更多
This study presents statistical results of a comparison between English abstracts in a leading intemational medical journal and those in a Chinese one. With a genre analysis and discussion of linguistic features of th...This study presents statistical results of a comparison between English abstracts in a leading intemational medical journal and those in a Chinese one. With a genre analysis and discussion of linguistic features of these abstracts, the paper points out the weak points in the abstracts by Chinese writers and provides some suggestions for writing abstracts of medical research articles展开更多
文摘College English teaching in China has long focused on importing cultures of English countries while neglecting to enhance students’English competence in home culture.The present research aims to investigate Chinese non-English major undergraduates’competence in translating Chinese cultural items into English and the significant predictors of such competence.With a test and a questionnaire as research instruments,this study was conducted to assess 82 undergraduates’ability to translate three different levels of Chinese culture-specific items into English and explored the factors which might have affected the students’home culture translation ability.The results show that the participants did well in translating the surface layer cultural items,but their performance in sub-surface and deep layer culture translation tasks was far from being satisfactory.It was also found that students had positive attitudes towards Chinese culture and were willing to learn to express Chinese culture in English,but their English learning motivation in general was not strong enough,and they were not given much input on Chinese culture in their English class.Students’Chinese cultural knowledge and their awareness of the importance of learning Chinese culture in English were found to be the two significant factors that can predict their performance in the translation tasks.These findings have implications for the teaching of culture and cross-cultural communications in EFL classes.
文摘The recent years have witnessed increasing opportunities for people from various cultural backgrounds to communicate with each other, which is naturally based on a general grasp of cultural knowledge and communicative techniques in cross-cultural settings. However, there often exist cultural clashes in such cases, especially between Chinese and English speaking people, which are deeply rooted in the wide differences in their languages and thinking modes. Indeed, this also serves to be an important part in the acquisition of the English culture for Chinese students in the current educational climate. The paper is intended to provide a contrastive analysis of the major cultural differences between Chinese and English speaking people in their thinking modes in three aspects of the descriptive versus the formal, the concrete versus the abstract, and the practical versus the logical form the linguistic perspective. And the paper comes to the conclusion that a general understanding of these significant differences may enable Chinese-speaking people and English-speaking people to establish a more efficient communication with each other.
基金Supported by the Scientific Research Project(Humanities and Social Sciences)in 2012 Granted by the Education Department of Shaanxi Provincial Government(12JK0268)
文摘This study presents statistical results of a comparison between English abstracts in a leading intemational medical journal and those in a Chinese one. With a genre analysis and discussion of linguistic features of these abstracts, the paper points out the weak points in the abstracts by Chinese writers and provides some suggestions for writing abstracts of medical research articles