Week 9 · Functional Varieties and Translation Strategies 功能文体与翻译对策

Nov 9, 2026 · ← Course home

Planned session. The theory half closes with a grand tour of the applied varieties, read side by side to train your contrastive eye: news (inverted pyramid, nominalisation, attribution), public speech (parallelism, rhetorical questions, first-person plural), advertising (puns, coinages, imperatives), official and legal prose (embedding, formulaic precision, zero ambiguity), and sci-tech writing (passive voice, terminology, nominal strings).

Each variety demands its own translating strategy — 刘宓庆’s core claim. We study his per-variety strategies and the classic failure mode, 文体错位 (style clash): a legal clause rendered chatty, a colloquial narrator bureaucratised, register markers erased. The message survives; the text dies. We close the half by choosing project tracks and forming concrete plans for the computational weeks.

Key concepts: variety profiles; register translation; style clash; strategy selection by variety.

Reading: 刘宓庆 variety chapters (news, exposition, official documents, sci-tech); 董启明 Ch. 9–12 for the sample analyses.

Slides and materials will be posted here after class.