On May 10, 2025, the Eighth Discipline Review Group for Foreign Languages and Literatures of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council convened the Symposium on Innovation and Development of Foreign Languages and Literatures in the Digital-Intelligent Era in Chengdu. The meeting reviewed the discipline’s significant role in serving national strategies and promoting intercultural exchange, and reached four major consensuses in response to the opportunities and challenges brought by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. These include strengthening the disciplinary mission to advance the construction of China’s independent knowledge system; seizing digital-intelligent opportunities to innovate research paradigms and talent cultivation models; leveraging multilingual strengths to enhance the international communication effectiveness of Chinese narratives; and deepening country and area studies to contribute Chinese perspectives and wisdom to global governance. The meeting called on the discipline to actively respond to the demands of the times and to demonstrate its irreplaceable value.

Against the backdrop of the profound transformation brought about by artificial intelligence, five scholars engage in an in-depth discussion on pathways for innovation and development in the discipline of foreign languages and literatures. They argue that while remaining committed to the fundamental mission of language and culture education, the discipline should actively harness digital and intelligent technologies to expand research paradigms and pedagogical approaches. By promoting interdisciplinary integration through the “foreign languages plus” model, deepening country and area studies, and cultivating composite talents equipped with humanistic literacy, digital competence, and a global vision, the discipline can better meet contemporary demands. The scholars emphasize that foreign language studies must proactively align with national strategies, enhance international communication and narrative capacity, and ultimately contribute irreplaceable Chine

Based on corpus, this paper analyzes the diplomatic discourses of Ukraine and Russia to explore how proximization strategies are employed to legitimize their discourses and uncover the underlying reasons. The study reveals that spatially, Ukraine’s diplomatic discourse exhibits a stronger spatial-proximization-dominated feature than Russia’s, with both constructing distinct IDCs and ODCs. Temporally, Russia’s diplomatic discourse emphasizes “past-present” temporal proximization, while Ukraine’s discourse highlights the “future-present” span. Axiologically, Ukraine rationalizes its discourse through values of “regularity” and “westernization”, whereas Russia underscores justice rooted in “historical”values. Differences in interest selection within communicative games and variations in social cognitive perceptions of national identity may account for the distinct proximization features in the diplomatic discourses of the two sides. The findings may reveal the ideological drivers behind discourse legitimization and shed light on the interactions between discourse, power and social reality.

National language security is a key component of holistic national security, yet existing researches have generally failed to conduct an in-depth exploration of these issues and their characteristics. To address this gap, this paper first clarifies the definition and basic scope of national language security, then takes “National Security and Defence Dataset” as the research object to comprehensively explore the characteristics and develops a model to address national language security issues. The study finds that military language competence and the implementation of official language policies are among the core concerns of national language security. These issues collectively form a complex model encompassing status planning, corpus planning, acquisition planning, and discourse planning. The exploration of national language security issues and model construction may help provide theoretical insights and practical references to improve holistic national language security capabilities.

By analyzing the results of a word association test and a controlled productive vocabulary test of EFL learners from three successive grades, the current research investigated the correlation between the organization of mental lexicon and the development of EFL Learners’ productive vocabulary. The results showed that: (1) The syntagmatic associations in different stages increased significantly and the productive vocabulary had shown a significant development trend between the second and third grade; (2) The productive vocabulary was positively related with paradigmatic association in the first grade and with world knowledge association in the second grade; (3) Generally speaking, the combination of different types of word association and, specifically, the syntagmatic associations had predictive effects on the development of productive vocabulary.

At present, the Country-and-Area Studies (CAS), listed as a major urgently needed by the national strategy, have received the extensive attention in higher education. It is suggested, however, that the discipline of Foreign Linguistics and Literature (FLL) should avoid rushing into action regardless of its own weaknesses and limitations. The CAS aim to serve the country’s foreign political and economic diplomatic strategies, which require the disciplinary knowledge of politics, economics, history, sociology, jurisprudence and anthropology. Obviously, FLL could not be easily qualified for it. What we can do is to cooperate with scholars of the discipline of International Relations and conduct the studies in the aspects of culture, literature and linguistics which are our strength. Culture, reflected in novels, could inform us of a country’s government system, economic models and ideological beliefs. Apart from literature, we could also find the attitudes of the target government through the texts of government reports, political speeches and news reports by using corpus-based critical discourse analysis.

In response to the new requirements for higher-order thinking skills in the AI era, this paper investigates an innovative approach to fostering critical thinking by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into the EFL reading instruction. It constructs and illustrates a three-step cyclical teaching model (diagnose-challenge-reconstruct) designed to externalize and scaffold the internal process of critical thinking. The LLM is tasked with the dual roles of diagnosing and challenging, offering both analytical feedback and counterarguments to students’ initial perspectives. Students, in turn, critically engage with, reflect upon and revise their ideas, leading to a profounder and reconstructed understanding. This human-AI collaborative paradigm not only revitalizes conventional pedagogy but also prompts a shift in the teacher’s role from a knowledge transmitter to a critical thinking facilitator. The ultimate objective is to equip students with the essential skills of independent thinking and sound judgment necessary for navigating a complex information society.

This paper addresses the proposition of the “Golden Ratio” in translation practice, which has been proposed by some scholars from the perspective of translator behavior criticism (TBC) theory. It delves into several issues, including the relationship between “truth-seeking” and “utility-attaining” as opposed to “dead translation” and “creativity,” the maintenance of a dynamic balance between “truth-seeking” and “utility-attaining,” and the establishment of the “Golden Ratio” range in translation practice. The Golden Ratio is a metaphor for the optimal state of translation. It is a theoretical issue related to translation practice and falls within the scope of translation criticism. This paper lays the foundation for objectively conducting translation criticism and reasonably enhancing translation practice. It also strengthens the component of guiding translation practice and translation criticism practice in the development of translator behavior criticism theory.

Emotion in the translation of children’s literature is of vital importance to child readers’ emotional perception of the translated works and children’s emotional development. We propose that the cognitive equivalence of emotion in the translation of children’s literature includes the effective transmission of emotional texture, emotional intensity and emotional aesthetics. The three complement each other and together constitute the system of emotional cognitive equivalence. In the face of the challenge of emotional translation of children’s literature, the translator needs to judge the degree and change of the original emotion by tracing back to the emotional vocabulary of the source text, and restore the aesthetic characteristics of the original image beauty and phonetic beauty, so as to promote the cognitive schema of the text emotion among the original author, the translator and the reader to achieve the fusion of horizons, and to convey the emotional texture, intensity and aesthetic characteristics of the source text to the greatest extent, so as to finally realize the emotional equivalence in the translation of children’s literature.

The ethics of difference in translation advocates confrontational foreignization to resist cultural hegemony, narcissism and the unequal status of language and culture. It has similar evaluation criteria and value system with faithfulness, as in translation practice, only flexible use of various strategies can achieve the ethical goal and faithful results. However, the ethic of difference was far from perfect at the early stage of its construction, and in its development, there have also been problems such as blurred application boundaries, pursuit of utilitarianism, and inadequate attention to practical considerations. Therefore, the analysis of ethics of difference should be strictly controlled and used according to multiple dimensions such as ideology and practice orientation, to facilitate critical reform, so as to promote the continuous development of translation ethics research. Based on a critique of the ethical thinking of Berman and Venuti, this paper explores ways to improve the theoretical system and practical application of the ethics of difference. In order to meet the needs of translation research and cross-cultural translation and publication, the improvement of the theoretical system of ethics of differences needs clarification of the degree between alienation and naturalization, de-emphasis of ideological attributes, and close integration with specific translation practice.