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Prof. Sun Yifeng, Deputy of IATIS, gave a lecture at SIS

date:2010-09-13

 

Prof. Sun Yifeng, Deputy of IATIS, gave a lecture at SIS

 

March 1, 2010

 

At 2:00 p.m., December 21, a lecture entitled "China's Translation and MTI Education" given by Prof. Sun Yifeng, deputy of IATIS and head of Department of Translation of Lingnan University, was held successfully in SIS lecture hall. With rich and colorful content, the lecture, originally planned for 1.5 hours on the schedule, did not finish

until 5 p.m. And after, all the people present were still immersed in it. From the wonderful lecture, the teachers

and students had a clear and accurate view of the recent development of translation studies closely related to

China's culture strategies and the history mission of translators and translators of poetry.

 

In the beginning warm-up introduction, Prof. Chen Gang, director of Institute of Translation Studies soon

reduced the academic distance between the lecturer and the audiences by using such key words as ‘a man of

striking appearance’, ‘solid academic foundation’, ‘knowing all the answers to the questions raised’, and

‘Welcome to challenge Prof. Sun’. The audiences were very eager to communicate with Prof. Sun.

 

It is an important part of the bounden mission of MTI education to cultivate more outstanding professional

translators. Prof. Sun pointed out some of the main sticking points of domestic MTI sharply as follows:

To begin with, the conditions of professional MTI teachers are not satisfactory. The lack of professional MTI

teachers still exists at present and will last in the coming several years. There are difficulties in students

recruiting and cultivating professional Chinese-English translators, since according to statistics from CIPG

(China International Publishing Group), the number of such translators could be less than 100 in nowadays

China. Besides, some problems exist in studying C-E translation courses especially those on translating

things related to China. Professional MTI teaching materials should substitute those current bad and poor

ones, and the issues of how to find eligible compilers and compile MTI-characterized teaching materials still

need to be solved. Both academic training and professional training in MTI education need improving as well.

What's more, though some doctors got the degree, their English proficiency is not good enough to teach MTI.

Also, the rules of some documents related are ambiguous. For example, the bottom line of 200-300 thousand

translation work does not differentiate between E-C translation and C-E translation. C-E translation is closely

related to the output of China's soft power and the amount of translation work is also decided by whether

it is recycle translation, multi-theme or multi-genre translation or other translation. As a result of all these

obvious and potential problems, we are unable to cultivate excellent innovative talents who can ‘Translate China’

and professional translators or interpreters who are warmly welcomed by all walks of life. MTI will not get

further development if those problems are not completely solved in time.

 

With this background, the second topic Prof. Sun's lecture were attractive. As is known to all, translation

cannot live without hard practice. Translation studies in Hong Kong Universities all have their unique strengths.

Lingnan University has the advantage in literature translation. Prof. Sun gave rich examples of C-E translation

whose expressions were quite common in daily life, such as the English translations of The Besieged City,

 A Dream of Red Mansion, brochures of touring specifically and so on. Prof. Sun pointed out that translators

were asked to learn how to translate well by put ting focus on level and multi-context in translation in order

to get the same feeling and have a deep resonance with the readers in the translated text.

 

The section of Q&A was also very important in the lecture. Both the lecturer and the audiences had a

lively face-to-face talk. Though time was limited, questions raised by both the teachers and the students

actively, including some on the development of translation studies, were all answered perfectly by Prof. Sun.

All the people present benefited much and burst into applause for the lecturer's bold humorous language

style, British English pronunciation, and especially the academic attainments and patience.

 

(Translated by TONG Shan)

 
 
 

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