Well-known Translation Scholar Christiane Nord Visits HBUE

  

  

(Correspondent Wang Changzhi）Professor Christiane Nord, a well-known translation scholar specializing in Functionalist Skopos theory, was invited to give a lecture in the School of Foreign Languages (SFL), HBUE on October 23. The lecture was chaired by Professor He Mingxia, dean of SFL, and more than 100 teachers and students attended the lecture.

  

The lecture focused on the topic of “A Young Discipline with a Long Tradition－A Brief History of Translation Studies”. Professor Nord reviewed the evolution of translation and its studies, discussed haunting dilemmas of translation from different dimensions of developmental stages, and expounded schools, paths and paradigms of translation studies.

  

Also, Professor Nord gave a vivid account of the following topics, such as code-switching in the process of translation from the perspective of equivalence and machine translation, the understanding process of translation from new hermeneutics and deconstruction, the goal-directed translation behavior from Skopos and function and the thinking process of translation from audio thinking and keystroke recording.

  

Elements of cultural factors, such as descriptive translation and the theory of multiple systems, identity of post-colonialism, feminism and corpus translation studies, etc. were mentioned as well in the lecture.

  

At the end of the lecture, Professor Nord answered questions from students and teachers and offered them valuable advice on the study and teaching of translation. Her forward-looking answers with incisive insights won warm and lasting applause. The attenders thought that the lecture could definitely promote teaching and research of translation in HBUE.

  

Introduction to Christiane Nord:

Christiane Nord (born 13 September 1943, Eberswalde, Germany) is a German translation scholar. She studied translation at Heidelberg University; in 1983 she obtained her PhD in Romance Studies, with habilitation in applied translation studies and translation pedagogy. From 1967 she has been involved in translator training at the universities of Heidelberg, Vienna, Hildesheim, Innsbruck and Magdeburg (1996-2005). Her main works are as follows:

1. Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Functionalist Approaches Explained. 1997.

2. Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2nd. revised edition, 2005.