Choice of tense in English translations
Linguistic Explorations in Translation Studies - Analyses of English Translations of Ancient Chinese Poems and Lyrics - Guowen Huang
Guowen Huang [+ ]
City University of Macau
HUANG Guowen is Chair Professor of the Changjiang Programme selected by the Ministry of Education of P.R. China. He has been a professor of Functional Linguistics since 1996 at Sun Yat-sen University, P.R. China. He is now at City University of Macau. He was educated in Britain and received two PhD degrees from two British universities (1992: Applied Linguistics, Edinburgh; 1996, Functional Linguistics, Cardiff). He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2004-2005 at Stanford University. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal Foreign Languages in China (bimonthly) published by the Higher Education Press, China. He is also co-editor of the journal of Functional Linguistics (Springer) and co-editor of Journal of World Languages (Routledge). He publishes extensively both in China and abroad and serves/served as an editorial/advisory committee member for several journals, including Linguistics and the Human Sciences (Equinox), Language Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Applied Linguistics (Equinox), and Social Semiotics (Carfax). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Monograph Series Discussions in Functional Approaches to Language (Equinox). His research interests include Systemic Functional Linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies.
Description
Written in classical Chinese, ancient poems differ from modern Chinese poems and English poems in terms of linguistic expression. Chapter 13 investigates the choice of tense in English translations of ancient Chinese poems and offers an analysis of tense choices. In English translations of ancient poems, the selection of tense can reflect the translators’ understanding of the original poem and their control over artistic conception. Under certain conditions, two or more tenses are possible to be selected; while in other situations, the selection of tense will be rather restrained.