A Study on the English Translation of Culture-Loaded Words From the Perspective of Relevance-Theoretic Translation Theory-A Case Study of Yang Xianyi’s The True Story of Ah Q

Culture-loaded words reveal the basic features of a country’s social life,customs and habits,religious beliefs,and so on.The meanings of culture-loaded words contain the profound cultural connotation of a country or a nation.However,due to the influence of different cultures,the original author and the target readers lack a common cognitive context,which means they cannot successfully conduct a cultural communication.Therefore,correctly understanding and translating these culture-loaded words have become a major problem for translators in the translation process of literary works.Under the guidance of the dual ostensive-inferential model in relevance-theoretical translation theory,this paper,by emphasizing the importance of common cognitive context to a successful translation,analyzes the translation process of five categories of culture-loaded words and summarizes the translation strategies that can accurately convey the writing intention of the original author,which provides a new perspective for the translation of culture-loaded words.

Contextual Meaning and Word Meaning

The paper has three goals: 1) Explain the role of context and word in meaning construction and comprehension. 2) Present a model that can explain meaning generated by both monolingual and multilingual meaning construction systems. 3) Discuss how the model can be applied to explain major issues in pragmatics. Pragmatics is understood here in a narrow sense as defined by Sperber & Noveck: “...pragmatics is the study of how linguistic properties and contextual factors interact in the interpretation of utterances” (Sperber & Noveck 2004∶1). It is argued that world knowledge is available to interlocutors in two forms: as encapsulated in lexical items based on prior encounters and experience (conventionalized cognitive context), and as provided by the actual situational context framed by the situation in which the interaction takes place. Meaning formally expressed in the linguistic interactional context is created on-the-spot, and is the result of the interaction of the two sides of world knowledge and the actual situational context. The paper makes three claims∶ First, supremacy of context is not unconditional in language processing. Second, salient meaning rather than literal meaning of lexical units plays a central role in comprehension. Third, intercultural communication differs from intracultural communication in the conceptual content of conventionalized cognitive contexts rather than in communicative means.

An Immersive Virtual Reality System for Rodents in Behavioral and Neural Research

Context cognition involves abstractly deriving meaning from situational information in the world and is an important psychological function of higher cognition. However, due to the complexity of contextual information processing, along with the lack of relevant technical tools, little remains known about the neural mechanisms and behavioral regulation of context cognition. At present, behavioral training with rodents using virtual reality techniques is considered a potential key for uncovering the neurobiological mechanisms of context cognition. Although virtual reality technology has been preliminarily applied in the study of context cognition in recent years, there remains a lack of virtual scenario integration of multi-sensory information, along with a need for convenient experimental design platforms for researchers who have little programming experience. Therefore, in order to solve problems related to the authenticity, immersion, interaction, and flexibility of rodent virtual reality systems, an immersive virtual reality system based on visual programming was constructed in this study. The system had the ability to flexibly modulate rodent interactive 3 D dynamic experimental environments. The system included a central control unit, virtual perception unit, virtual motion unit, virtual vision unit, and video recording unit. The neural circuit mechanisms in various environments could be effectively studied by combining two-photon imaging and other neural activity recording methods. In addition, to verify the proposed system′s performance, licking experiments were conducted with experimental mice. The results demonstrated that the system could provide a new method and tool for analyzing the neural circuits of the higher cognitive functions in rodents.