
Academics of six universities from the mainland and Hong Kong attended the first Symposium on Applied Translation Studies at UIC on 27 November.
Organised by the Applied Translation Studies Programme (ATS) of UIC’s Division of Humanities and Social Sciences (DHSS), the symposium discussed the theme of “New Developments in Translation and Interpreting Studies: Issues of Application”.

Dean of DHSS Prof Mei-hwa Sung said in her opening address that the symposium offered an excellent academic exchange platform in addition to helping broaden students’ horizons.
Giving the keynote speech was Prof Leo Tak-Hung Chan, Head and Professor of Translation at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University as well as Member of DHSS Advisory Committee. He spoke of the importance of academic translation in all translation studies subjects in his talk “Must We Write in English? Academic Translation in China”.

Prof Leo Tak-Hung Chan
In a plenary session, ATS Programme Director Dr Dawn Tsang, together with Assistant Professor Dr Qian Hong and Dr Siu Lam, presented the innovating translation pedagogy of ATS which aims to maximize teaching effectiveness while meeting with students’ needs and desire.

Dr Dawn Tsang
Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai’s Prof Weixiong Wu talked about information reconstruction and situational effect in public sign test translation.

Prof Weixiong Wu
Prof Yiping Chen from Jinan University then drew the participants’ attention to the topic of impoliteness in translations of Hong Lou Meng in a systemic functional linguistics perspective.

Prof Yiping Chen
Ms Crystal Kwong from the Open University of Hong Kong discussed how Cantonese slang terms are rendered by court interpreters in Hong Kong in a corpus-based approach.

Ms Crystal Kwong
Dr Guixia Xie, Assistant Professor of Sun Yat-sen University presented her research on the Chinese translation of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Dr Guixia Xie
UIC’s Dr Sarka Masarova concluded the presentations of the day by exploring the expression of self in poetry and poetry translations in the selected poems of Shu Ting in the Chinese original and Czech and English translations.

Dr Sarka Masarova

Reporter: Jack Zhu (ATS, Year 4)
Photographer: He Jiayun (ATS, Year 4)
Editor: Deen He
(from MPRO, with special thanks to the ELC)