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Journey to the West (西游记; Xi You Ji) is one of the best-known classic novels in Chinese literature, and it has been translated into English by various notable translators. This study compares the retranslation of the novel by Julia Lovell published in "Penguin Classics" in 2021 with Arthur Waley's translation in "Penguin Classics" in 1973. Employing a stylometric approach to compare the styles of the two translations, it uses the corpus tools of word lists, keyword analysis, and function word analysis. The results reveal distinct stylistic differences in the translators' styles, including lexical density, sentence length, and function words, which point to different translation strategies employed by the two translations of this classic Chinese novel. The book reviews published so far indicate that Lovell's version has been well received by contemporary Anglophone readers and that the changes in this retranslation may have helped to explain the recanonization of the original classic. This study provides new insights into the understanding of the differences between translation and retranslation, and thus has implications for the fields of translator style studies and stylometry research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpreting is an activity embedded in a particular socio-cultural context that underpins norms of interpreting. Adopting the descriptive translation studies approach, this study aims to find out whether the interpretation for the Chinese government by institutional interpreters is becoming more target-oriented in the decade of the 2010s in comparison with the 1990s. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the Corpus of Interpreted Chinese Government Press Conferences in the 1990s and that of the 2010s, the study reveals that there is a significant increase in the total number of target-oriented shifts in the 2010s, manifested predominantly in "inserting hedges before propositional statements" and "modality shifts to attenuate ST's categorical force." Only minimal differences are found for the number of shifts in "explicitation of emphatic meanings," "specification of Chinese source deictic lexis," and "explicitation of implicit logic relations" between the two periods. The results thus indicate a general trend of becoming more target-oriented in interpreting, particularly a tendency to mitigate ST's illocutionary force to a greater extent in the 2010s. Such changes in China's institutional interpreting are correlated with the evolving socio-political context and the norms of institutional interpreting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a bibliometrical analysis of a database of quality articles in interpreting studies published between 2008 and 2012 in the 14 CSSCI and CORE journals that have published interpreting researches in China, this article describes the status quo of interpreting studies in China during the past five years, which provides latest information following up Wang & Mu (2009)'s survey about developments of the field from 1958 to 2007. A quantitative survey is conducted to reveal the annual production, the distribution of articles in different journals and active researchers of the field. More in-depth qualitative analysis is also done over the content and citation sources of the articles in order to examine distribution of research themes and topics, research methods and theoretical sources. It is found that the total publication of this period is comparable to 53.5% of the previous five decades. Their research themes range from interpreter training to theoretical issues, interpreting techniques and issues in practice, interpreting product, interpreting process and community, telephone and sign-language interpreting. Their research methods include theoretical conceptualization, literature analysis and review, theory-application analysis, summary and reflection of experiences, experimental studies, survey studies and observational studies. It is concluded from the bibliometrical analysis that new progress has been achieved in interpreting studies in China during the past five years, which is evident in more wide-ranging research themes and topics, more diversified theoretical sources and better utilization of methodology. The bibliometrical analysis also indicates the emergence of a new generation of researchers, who are expected to take interpreting studies to a new height with favorable institutional and academic environment in place in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against a background of favorable socio-economic conditions and the development of Translation Studies into an autonomous discipline, translation and interpreting programs are mushrooming in mainland China. This article reports on the development of interpreter training and research here in recent years through an overview of different types of training programs, curriculum designs, training models or paradigms, new textbooks and interpreter accreditation tests. Some salient examples of interpreting research in mainland China are also critically reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]