This paper explores the adjustment of the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) in the AI era, shifting the focus of classroom teaching from the cultivation of non-immediate communication skills to Spontaneous Communicative Competence. The paper first reviews the development of POA and analyzes its achievements and limitations in cultivating non-immediate communication skills. It then discusses the necessity, feasibility, and innovation of integrating AI technology to facilitate this shift, proposing an AI-empowered blended teaching model. Finally, through a specific teaching case, the paper demonstrates the application steps of this model in cultivating Spontaneous Communicative Competence. The study shows that the AI-empowered blended teaching model can effectively facilitate the shift in POA classroom teaching to focus on Spontaneous Communicative Competence, offering new ideas and methods for foreign language teaching reform.

With the development and widespread application of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), foreign language education is facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. How teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) can utilize GenAI in professional development has become an important research topic that urgently needs exploration. Drawing on multiple sources of data, this qualitative study systematically explores how three middle-school English teachers, in a lesson study project, integrate and utilize GenAI in their EFL teaching and professional development. The findings identify three routes of professional development for the teachers: 1) from “technostress” to “integration and innovation”; 2) from “improvisation” to “evidence-based improvement”; and 3) from “externally driven” to “collective efficacy”. The study highlights that the EFL teachers’ professional development in the GenAI era  is essentially a dynamic evolution process, covering multiple aspects such as cognitive reconstruction, decision optimization, and deepened reflection. It also offers important implications for EFL teacher development.

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.

Research on metaphor, metonymy and application of cognitive linguistics has been moving into deeper territories. Classic topics of cognitive linguistics, i. e., categorization, prototypes and center-periphery radiations, conceptual metaphor, polysemy, constructions, meaning-driven and usage-frequency-based learning, are being increasingly intertwined with second-language pedagogy while simultaneously expanding toward social, cultural and interdisciplinary concerns. Building on introspective and psycholinguistic experimentation, new methods now include discourse analysis, corpus techniques and cognitive-neuroscientific approaches. With cognitive-linguistic inquiry situated in second-language teaching and the “real world” (see Low, Todd, Deignan & Cameron 2010; Cameron & Maslen 2010), this interview with Jeannette Littlemore, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, President of the International Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (2023-2027), and Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, foregrounds two key insights: (1) language is formed, developed, varied and innovated in use, governed by multi-dimensional factors beyond fixed rules; (2) cognitive linguistics can be an invisible yet powerful operational tool to understand lived experience and solve real-world problems, provided that its methodological and interdisciplinary boundaries continue to be pushed. Current international advances on construal, categorization, conceptual transfer, embodiment, resemblance, metonymy and gesture stand in contrast to China’s still-lagging scene marked by dispersion, redundancy and fragmentation; a stronger interdisciplinary research community is to be built up in urgency. Beyond the scholarship, Professor Littlemore’s reflections on academic life and her advice to doctoral students and early-career scholars offer timely inspiration.

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 so-called “discourse frame” is a kind of inner meaning structure constructed by “discourse events”, and it is the “overall meaning” embedded either within texts or across intertextual spaces. While individual “discourse events” presents a series of different specific “discourse frames”, is there a “meta-frame”behind it—a fundamental framework that all “discourse events” inevitably engage with? Based on the theory of “New Speech Act Analysis”, this paper proposes an analytical pathway to examine discursive “meta-frame ”  through the dynamic interplay of Subject - Context - Intention - Text - Rules. Building upon this “meta-frame”, we may construct analytical frameworks emphasizing respectively “speech subjects”, “contextual parameters”, “intention typologies”, “textual processes”, “rule systems”; we may construct analytical frameworks primarily focused on dyadic relationships such as“subject-context”, “subject-intention”, “subject-text”, “subject-rules” and so on; we also may construct analytical frameworks integrating triadic interactions including “subject-context-intention”, “subject-text-intention” and so on. Furthermore, discourse frame analysis should neither rigidly adhere to any specific research approach, nor neglect the need to construct an awareness of “meta-frame”.

This study employed a meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach to synthesize data from 24 studies with a total of 15, 828 valid samples. The results indicate that foreign language enjoyment and foreign language anxiety are two emotional dimensions that are both interrelated and independent, each exerting a significant influence on foreign language achievement. Meanwhile, four moderating variables including gender, language skills, cultural group, and second language affect the relationship between these two emotional factors and foreign language achievement to varying degrees. Further comparisons reveal that, compared with foreign language anxiety, foreign language enjoyment exerts a stronger impact on foreign language achievement.

Through a semantic processing task priming paradigm, this research investigates the priming effects of the matching task of macro-categories on micro-category in metaphor processing, hence taking an insight into the realization mechanism of metaphorical categorization. The result shows that in the semantic structure mapping task, even without being explicitly demanded to recognize the category relation between the topic and the vehicle, the shortened reaction time to category associated target demonstrated that the mapping task activated the category association between the topic and the vehicle, yet the same priming effect was not found in pure semantic associating task. In contrast to pure semantic associating task, the priming effect of the mapping task exerted on category target indicates that the categorization of the topic and the vehicle is based on the structural mapping between the semantic relations involving the topic and the vehicle and the corresponding objects. This study provides further empirical evidence for the first-matching-later-projecting model in metaphorical categorization.

This study utilizes natural language processing (NLP) technology to construct a Japanese discourse cohesion index system. It then investigates the acquisition of discourse cohesion in Japanese by advanced learners with different native languages, specifically Chinese and Korean. The findings reveal discrepancies between the essays written by advanced learners and those written by native speakers in aspects such as lexical overlap, semantic overlap, connectives, and references. By calculating the Euclidean distance between the cohesion indices of native speakers’ essays and those of language learners, it is observed that, compared with essays written by Chinese learners, those written by Korean learners are more cohesive and closer to those written by native speakers. This phenomenon can be attributed to the similarities between Korean and Japanese. This discovery enhances the theory of language transfer by providing empirical evidence from discourse cohesion in the essays written by foreign language learners from China and Korea.

Criticality has always been highly valued in academic literature review but seems to be overlooked in cross-language studies. This current study adopted the attitude polarity taxonomy and the graduation system in Martin’s appraisal theory to compare the critical attitude in Chinese and English academic literature reviews excerpted from 30 Chinese SSCI articles and 30 English CSSCI articles. Results showed that the frequency of negative attitude in English literature review is significantly higher than that in Chinese and also English utilizes much more down toners, especially in the form of verbs and modal verbs, to present author’s cautious but objective authorial stance. The potential factors underlying these differences in criticality are also discussed in depth.

In 2022, the Ministry of Education launched the Collaborative Quality Improvement Programme for Normal Education, which coordinates leading normal universities to provide essential support to weaker normal colleges and universities in underdeveloped central and western regions. A key component of this initiative is enhancing information infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of high-quality educational resources among participating institutions. Thus, the digital agency of teacher educators participating in the programme is crucial for its successful and smooth execution. Grounded in ecological theory, this study focuses on foreign language teacher educators from two collaborating institutions. Through a case study approach, it explores developmental mechanisms of their digital-intelligent educational agency within the new cross-institutional collaborative ecosystem. The goal is to offer theoretical insights and practical implications to further develop the Collaborative Quality Enhancement Plan in teacher education.

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.

With the rapid rise of short-form content platforms such as TikTok, the traditional role of the “teacher” has undergone unprecedented transformations in digital contexts. Focusing on popular French-language teaching creators, this study analyzes linguistic, paralinguistic, bodily, and media modalities in TikTok short videos. Drawing on the Motivation Model of Pragmatics, it examines how 14 creators negotiate between transactional and interactional intentions, balancing “teaching” with “attracting views” and “authority” with “affinity”. Our finding reveals that while TikTok’s multimodal affordances facilitate the construction of professional identity, its entertainment-driven mechanisms also intensify audience participation and interaction. This dual dynamic gives rise to three typical identity types: the authoritative knowledge teacher, the friendly guide, and the performative entertainer.

Translation of kernel concepts should follow the essential principle of coherence and focus on the inherent relationships among the propositions as a system. Theoretical foundations such as Quine’s “web of belief”and Davidson’s coherence theory of truth provide a robust linguistic philosophical basis for examining the “truth ” in coherent translation practices. In his work The Thought of Chang Tsai (1020-1077), Ira E. Kasoff meticulously adheres to the principle of coherence, focusing on the key concepts of the Guanzhong School. Through systematic compilation and comprehensive analysis, the author maintains a continuous and coherent vision. By threading the ideas through the lenses of rationalism and the theory of Qi, the translation underscores the internal consistency of these concepts. Furthermore, by tracing the historical lineage and comparing them with contemporaneous philosophies, the work highlights the evolutionary inheritance of these ideas. As an exemplary case of Neo-Confucianism in translation, The Thought of Chang Tsai (1020-1077) offers a model for the cross-cultural interpretation of classical Chinese philosophical concepts.

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.

Based on the PICRAT model, this study conducted a questionnaire survey among 1, 008 primary school English teachers based in Shanghai. The research aimed to investigate how the teachers utilise digital and intelligent technologies to enhance textbook use, identify factors influencing their use of technology, and propose strategies to address the challenges they face. The findings reveal that the teachers’ technology use mainly focuses on improving efficiency and providing additional resources. The technologies are most frequently used to “Replace” existing teaching media, followed by applications to “Amplify” teaching and learning practices, and the use to “Transform” practices is minimal. The teachers face challenges such as insufficient technological literacy, limited access to tools, resource misalignment, inadequate policy support and collegial networks. To advance from merely “teaching with technology” to “empowering learning through technology,” it is essential to build a robust teacher-education support system for AI-empowered textbook use and promote the use of AI toward the “Creative” and “Transformative” dimensions of the PICRAT model. By applying the PICRAT model to technology-empowered textbook use and exploring the application of technology integration theory in primary school English education, this study provides data-driven insights and recommendations for the “AI+ Education” initiative, thereby supporting the improvement of teachers’ digital literacy.

Previous studies on interrupting have paid little attention to its dynamic generating mechanism. This paper, taking assistance-type cooperative interrupting as the research object, has made a comprehensive interpretation of how it is generated from the perspective of relevance theory and politeness principle. It is found that assistance-type cooperative interrupting is a verbally communicative behavior in which the interrupter, governed by the politeness principle, assists the interrupted person in conveying communicative information and intention based on the assumed understanding inferred. This process entails two pragmatic manifestations: 1) the awareness of participating, namely, confirming the conversational topic initiated by the interrupted person; 2) the awareness of caring for others’ needs, namely, satisfying the transactional motivations of the interrupted person. This study deepens the understanding of interrupting, which can provide inspiration for future research.

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.

At present, China’s translation and language service industry is expanding rapidly, and translation education is developing at a fast pace. However, there remains a shortage of high-quality and professional translators, particularly those proficient in non-common languages. By examining the development and establishment of the Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) program, this study reviews relevant research since its inception, identifies issues that have emerged during its implementation, and extracts valuable experiences and insights. These findings are then applied to the construction of the doctoral program in translation and interpreting (DTI). The study proposes that China’s DTI program should adhere to the principles of serving national strategies, innovating cultivation models, constructing a multi-dimensional evaluation system, and emphasizing institution-specific characteristics. These measures aim to contribute to the development of professional degrees in translation and interpreting in the new era.

The scientific and technological translation in the late Ming Dynasty was a climax in the history of Chinese translation, marking the beginning of the systematic exchange and integration of Chinese and Western scientific and technological cultures. The representative practices of this kind were those conducted by Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi. Taking Matteo Ricci’s cultural adaptation strategy as the object of examination, this paper explores the cultural integration in the practice of scientific and technological translation in the late Ming Dynasty. It is found at first that the social changes and unique cultural background of the late Ming Dynasty contributed to the formation of Ricci’s cultural adaptation strategy, and the development of western science and technology provided a rich practical basis for Ricci’s cultural adaptation strategy in a variety of translation practices. At the same time, the academic missionary work based on translation of Western science and technology, the localization policy showing his respect to Chinese culture, and the upper-class approach of befriending the scholars and bureaucrats were the main elements of the cultural adaptation strategy. On the basis of understanding the strategy of cultural adaptation, the paper, thereafter, analyzes the cultural integration in the translated works of the late Ming Dynasty represented by Elements of Euclid, Tongwen Suanzhi (Epitome Arithmetic Practice), and Qiankun Tiyi, among others. It is finally concluded that the cultural adaptation strategy facilitated the mutual learning and integration of Chinese and Western scientific and technological cultures in the late Ming Dynasty, thus promoting the transformation of the traditional Chinese scientific and technological knowledge system into a new knowledge system.

One of the important directions in the teaching and research of foreign literature is the people’s sense of gain in education, as can be logically deduced from Xi Jinping’s people-centered thought. The ideas contained in the instruction to “Tell Chinese stories well!” also highlight the importance of literature, as aesthetic resources, for people’s education. To enhance the effectiveness of foreign literature teaching and research, we need to reconstruct the history of foreign literature and build a robust cognitive framework, in which we clarify the key points of the history of human relations constructed by literature and literary theories, dialectically treat the existing literary histories constructed by the “canon”, and push for Chinese values to interact with foreign literature. In constructing such a cognitive framework in communication with students, it is especially necessary to have heightened geopolitical awareness. In addition, interdisciplinary approach is recommended, for other disciplines, such as finance, will prove to be able to stretch thinking and improve students’ mental sophistication and spiritual resilience.

CHEN Jingrong translated Baudelaire’s “Spleen IV” three times. The first translation was published in a period of criticism of “decadent literature”. CHEN took the initiative to reduce the intensity of spleen and the color of decadence. The second translation was published after the foundation of People’s Republic of China. CHEN transformed the translation according to the characteristics of revolutionary poetry and strengthened the combativeness of the poem to serve social realities. The third translation was published in the environment of Reform and Opening-up and intellectual emancipation. CHEN shifted from focusing on the utility of the poems to focusing on the artistic form of the poems. The course of her three translations of “Spleen IV” reflects the trend of change from utilitarianism to respect for the text, representing that translation strategies are closely related to changes in social and cultural environments.

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

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.

Speech acts constitute one of the fundamental units of human communication, and investigations based on authentic language data are indispensable for uncovering their underlying mechanisms. However, canonical corpus-based approaches based on formal search suffer from notable limitations due to the non-correspondence between pragmatic functions and linguistic forms. With the advancement of natural language processing, digital intelligence techniques have opened up new avenues for addressing the long-standing problem of the form-function mismatch in speech acts. This paper reviews the major developments in speech act research within both corpus linguistics and natural language processing, and highlights the synergetic potential between the two. Moreover, large language model technologies are expected to serve as one of the mainstream empirical methodologies in future pragmatics research.

The exo-skeletal model (or XS model) is a representative theory of neo-constructionist approaches, which offers unique insights into lexical derivation and argument structure, among other aspects. Given that there has been no comprehensive introduction to this theory at home, this article will attempt to provide a relatively in-depth introduction and analysis. On this basis, the article reflects on the XS model, and summarizes its advantages and disadvantages. Finally, this article discusses the possible insights that the XS model may bring to the research on Chinese argument structure, word classes, and idiomatic expressions, in the hope of providing a reference for the XS model’s further application in Chinese.

Wilhelm Gesenius was a renowned professor at the University of Halle in Germany and a specialist in various oriental languages. At the end of 1822, he happened to get acquainted with two young Cantonese sailors who were traveling in Germany. He came up with the idea of establishing Sinology as a scientific discipline in Germany with their assistance. Under the support of the Prussian authorities, the two Chinese were placed under the supervision of Gesenius, who paired them with two German doctors. The plan was for the Germans to learn Chinese and for the Chinese to learn German over the course of three years. Unfortunately, this experiment failed to produce the expected results. Nevertheless, it is regarded as the earliest verifiable attempt at mutual language instruction between Chinese and German, which is of cultural-historical significance. Based on primary archival sources, this paper examines the causes and effects of this relatively unknown historical event.

Metaphor, as a cognitive mechanism, plays a key role in the translation process, giving rise to the Metaphor Translation Theory. This paper attempts to explore the thinking approach and operational mechanism behind English translation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) discourse based on the Metaphor Translation Theory. The results demonstrate that target language (English translation) creation can be interpreted as a metaphorical process whereby the translator pursues cross-domain mapping, searching or establishing resemblance, relation, and correspondence between source language (TCM discourse) and target language variables across slots, relations, attributes and knowledge. This is done with comprehensive consideration of factors such as highlighting, coherence, cultural differences, and innovative spirit, in an attempt to identify appropriate translation methods that balance retaining Chinese cultural elements and target reader acceptance.

Influenced by the meaning characteristics of Chinese philosophical terms, the compilation of Chinese- English dictionaries of Chinese philosophical terms is required to reveal the historical and cultural connotations of terms as well as reconstruct the unique contexts for different meanings of polysemous terms with the help of interpretation. This paper, based on literature review and case analysis, draws on the research ideas of conceptual history and puts forward three specific principles that need to be followed in the English interpretation of C-E dictionaries of Chinese philosophical terms: the principles of historical objectivity, orientational conformity and contextual adaptation. Hopefully, it will help to solve the main problems in the compilation of such dictionaries in a more targeted manner, and then give full play to the important functions of such dictionaries in international exchanges and cultural dissemination.

This study adopts Appraisal Theory to conduct a positive discourse analysis of moral values in primary school English textbooks widely used in China. The study finds that: 1) Overall, there are no moral values represented in Grade One. From Grade Two to Grade Four, there is one or two moral values. In Grade Five and Grade Six, there are four and three moral values respectively. Totally there are eight types of moral values, the content of which conforms to Piagetian Moral Stage Theory. 2) Judgment resources take the largest proportion in all values. And in judgment, social sanction outnumbers social esteem. Apart from the lack of appreciation resources in the value of animal protection, the seven values all include affect, appreciation and judgment. The findings may be helpful for researchers to better understand the characteristics of moral values representation in Chinese primary school English textbooks and provide suggestions for future teaching practices and textbook development.

Based on the concepts of “role identity”, “group identity” and “person identity” in social psychology, this paper tries to find out the role identities of the co-translators and the group identities aggregated from different roles. It is found that the Chinese and foreign scientific and technological co-translators in the Ming and Qing dynasties were mainly foreign missionaries and local literati intellectuals, and the main sponsors were the missionary societies and government agencies. It is further found that scientific and technological co-translation in the Ming and Qing dynasties showed a tendency from being driven by private interactions to being driven by specific goals, from the passive participation of translators to their active initiation, and from the folk workshop mode to the government- sponsored mode. The sorting out of the identities of these scientific and technological co-translators helps to present the nature of Sino-foreign co-translation in the two dynasties, and to pave the way for further studies on the co- translation groups and the behavior of co-translators.

Despite notable advancements in artificial intelligence in the domains of common-sense reasoning and semantic understanding, achieving effective mutual understanding in human-machine interactions remains a significant challenge. Drawing on Conversation Analysis as the theoretical foundation, this paper conceptualizes human-machine interaction as a specialized branch of social interaction, and examines the pivotal role of Conversation Analysis in human-machine interaction research, focusing on three core aspects: the role of temporality and participants, anticipations in mutual understanding, the relationship between sequentiality and intersubjectivity, and the application of multimodal conversation analysis in this field. Finally, this paper proposes targeted implications of Conversation Analysis for the design, evaluation, and refinement of conversational systems.

Robert Burns’ lyric poem “A Red, Red Rose” has been translated incessantly in China since 1908. The four translators — Su Manshu, Yuan Shuipai, Yuan Kejia and Guo Moruo lived under different social backgrounds. They also differed in academic backgrounds, personal identities, and, consequently, in their translation materials, translation purposes and translation styles. Su Manshu and Guo Moruo both employed classical poetic forms, an approach characterized by utility-obtaining and ultra utility-obtaining; Yuan Shuipai and Yuan Kejia adopted vernacular rhyming translations, an approach characterized by both truth-seeking and utility-obtaining.

Few translation studies have their attention to the realization of persuasive rhetoric in the target text, and even less to the translator’s interventions on the rhetoric of identification. This paper takes the persuasive discourse in Journey to the West, particularly the utterance when Tripitaka and his disciples pass through different countries. Through the lens of the metafunctions, as purported by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study delves into the realization of identification in the translation by Waley and Lovell. Based on the characteristics of the rhetorical context, the study infers the translators’ intervention intentions. The findings can be summarized as follows: the lexicogrammatical configuration in Waley’s translation leads to a weakening of the rhetorical strength of identification, and the shift from speech to narrative as well as mistranslations results in a reduction in the amount of identification rhetoric. Lovell’s extensive omissions also cause a decrease in the amount of identification rhetoric. Her interventions occur more frequently in the rhetorical context of “the pursuit of the void”, with the rhetorical intention of weakening the religious narrative. By contrast, Waley’s interventions occur more often in the rhetorical context of “unified goals”, with the rhetorical intention of weakening the character narrative discourse.

Discourse is the basic resource of English teaching, and discourses in textbooks are an integral part of students’ learning content. English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools states that teachers should probe into the discourses and grasp the core content of teaching. The in-depth interpretation of textbook discourses is particularly important for the implementation of in-depth teaching. Based on extended cognition, this study puts forward three levels of discourse: logical, contextual and situational. Accordingly, when interpreting a discourse, teachers are also required to take the logic of knowledge, the context of the text and the situational nature of the language as an organic whole, go beyond the surface structure of knowledge, enter the teaching of deep structure, and lead the teaching to the depths of students’ thinking and emotion.

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.

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.

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.

This study adopts Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to test four large language models (ChatGPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Ernie 4.0, and Deepseek-R1) across Chinese and American cultural contexts with Chinese and English prompts. Through 16 experimental conditions and 16,000 samples, it analyzes the cultural tendencies of LLMs. Findings reveal that LLMs can reflect macro cultural differences between China and the U.S., but their representation of American cultural values remains more stable across languages, while representation of Chinese culture is more language-dependent and variable. Model outputs differ substantially from real human data, with higher alignment when simulating American culture. The study discusses the alignment between generative artificial intelligence and human language culture and its implications for multicultural ecology and intercultural understanding.

Based on the national policy guidelines for country and region studies in terms of disciplinary setting, scientific research, and talents cultivation, this paper firstly analyzes the connotation of regionology and country and region studies and puts forward nine core features of regionology. Secondly, it proposes six essential elements for constructing a regionology system with Chinese characteristics: building a disciplinary knowledge system, highlighting locally situated knowledge clusters while constructing a world-oriented social knowledge structure, developing universal theories and establishing a cross-disciplinary knowledge framework, serving the exchange and mutual learning among world civilizations with research objects that must encompass the globe, constructing a body of knowledge shared by all humanity, and adopting problem-oriented, integrated, project-based research. Finally, the paper presents ten key components for talents cultivation, including key countries, key languages, key fields, key knowledge, key methods, key competencies, key perspectives, key processes, key resources, and key curricula.