On Foreign Language Creation and Rootless Back Translation -A Case Study of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

With Adaptation Theory as its theoretical basis, this research makes comparison between Lisa See＇s original version of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Xin Yuanjie＇s Chinese translation based on a self-compiled manual annotation English-Chinese bilingual corpus. It aims at exploring the choice of language and the choice of translation method in the foreign language creation and rootless back-translation of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, discussing whether these choices adapt to the source language or the target language, and finding out the communicative effects they have achieved. The preliminary results show that： the choice of language and the choice of translation method in Foreign Language Creation mainly adapt to the target language to make easier for the target English readers to understand and partly adapt to the source language to keep local flavor; the choice of language and the choice of translation method in rootless back translation mainly adapt to the target language to make the translation authentic, accurate and smooth, and adaption to source language will lead to translationese. This research sheds new light on this special kind of writing and translation.

A perspective from Kenneth＇s works： On musical term translation

This paper mainly discusses some translation issues on musical works and terms of musical documents. Musical term translation is established by usage, musical researchers and those who understand music have no problems of understanding the musical terms and musical instruments and names of famous musicians. Foreign scholars obtain the ideas of Chinese culture by means of published writings in the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and also from the media and the Internet. Since there are cultural differences of mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, they may make misunderstanding in their works related to Chinese musicians, historical events and even musical instruments. Accurate back-translation of specific terms from the works written by foreign scholars requires corresponding specific and historical knowledge, consulting dictionaries and skills of using the Internet.

Data Augmentation Based Event Detection

Supervised models for event detection usually require large-scale human-annotated training data,especially neural models.A data augmentation technique is proposed to improve the performance of event detection by generating paraphrase sentences to enrich expressions of the original data.Specifically,based on an existing human-annotated event detection dataset,we first automatically build a paraphrase dataset and label it with a designed event annotation alignment algorithm.To alleviate possible wrong labels in the generated paraphrase dataset,a multi-instance learning(MIL)method is adopted for joint training on both the gold human-annotated data and the generated paraphrase dataset.Experimental results on a widely used dataset ACE2005 show the effectiveness of our approach.