Volume 9, Issue 2

Systemic functional translation studies (SFTS) has been a research area sustained by scholars from both Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and translation studies over the past decades. In China, there have been an increasing number of studies in SFTS after the 2000s, with Professor Guowen Huang being one of the pioneering and influential scholars contributing to this emerging research area. This paper is a transcript of an interview conducted with Guowen Huang and it serves to provide a general introduction to his research. In the interview, he discusses his motivation for exploring SFTS, the advantages of applying SFL to translation studies, and the Ph.D. students he has supervised over the past decades. He also introduces his own work on the translations of ancient Chinese poems, the translations of the Analects ( Lunyu 论语) of Confucius, and his investigation of applying ecolinguistics to translation studies. Finally, he suggests some future studies needed in this area.

The main purpose of this article is to present the mood system of Myanmar within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The mood system of Myanmar is composed of two simultaneous systems: mood type and mood force . The former focuses on describing the methods of exchange including declarative, interrogative, and imperative, while the latter focuses on the “language force” embedded in the exchange. In this study, certain structures for Mood realization and Mood particles used by Myanmar speakers are presented for each type and subtype of the mood type and mood force systems of Myanmar. The findings show the interpersonal metafunction of Myanmar language makes an important contribution to further contrastive studies between the mood systems and their realizations of Myanmar and those of foreign languages.

This article adopts an ecolinguistic approach to study the thematic choices in the General Debate statements by the US and China at the United Nations General Assembly (2017–2020) to reveal the eco-characteristics of the two countries’ thematic choices and their impacts on the constructions of international relations. Findings suggest that, from the perspective of ecosophy, a significant proportion of the US’s thematic choices are destructive to international relations, while China’s thematic choices are mostly beneficial and ambivalent. The US’s thematic choices are frequently used to portray “us versus them” and “America first”, which displays a message of egocentrism instead of ecocentrism. China’s thematic choices are typically used to show China’s willingness to undertake global responsibility and to jointly work with other stakeholders to safeguard our planet, echoing China’s global vision of “building a shared future for mankind”.

Many important results were achieved in ecolinguistic studies in 2022. This article reviews ecolinguistic studies in 2022, which aims to shed light on the future research directions. It consists of two main themes. First, studies are reviewed in terms of research areas, conferences, monographs, and journals. Then, based on the above results, issues are summarized and trends are predicted for the next phase of ecolinguistic studies. The review shows that the research scope of ecolinguistics has gradually developed from micro to macro. In addition, many academic conferences on ecological issues were held worldwide, and several publishing houses and journals published dedicated volumes and issues on ecolinguistics. It is suggested that ecolinguistic studies in the future should pay attention to the following points: continuing to emphasize the significance of ecolinguistics in the framework of linguistics, clarifying the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary attributes of ecolinguistics, and strengthening inquiries into issues such as ecological literacy, ecological awareness, and ecosophy.

This study aims to examine linguistic and non-linguistic determinants that contribute to language change in the Gurage area of Ethiopia. The linguistic and non-linguistic determinants were investigated by combining methods of dialectometry and mutual intelligibility. Principally, the study was interested in the potential influences of three linguistic factors (mutual intelligibility, contact-induced diffusion of linguistic features, and borrowing from dominant languages) and four non-linguistic factors (between-speakers contact, geographical distance, population size, and attitude of the speakers). Statistical analyses performed on the aforementioned factors show that the linguistic determinants significantly contribute to language change in the Gurage area. Geographical distance, attitude of the speakers, and contact among the speakers are the major non-linguistic contributors. Population size has a marginal influence.

Language plays a pivotal role in poverty alleviation. This article aims to explore the relationship between multilingual ability and poverty in Southwest China. By adopting a mixed design, this article studies the multilingual ability, occasions for language use, and attitudes towards the importance of language of the participants, as well as the correlations between the participants’ multilingual ability and the cause of poverty in relation to monthly household income. The sample comes from the mainstream Han ethnic group and 13 ethnic minority groups in 34 border poverty counties in Yunnan, Guangxi, and Tibet. The investigation concludes that Mandarin Chinese ability and local dialect ability quantitatively influence the income of the documented households, while ethnic minority language ability and English language ability qualitatively influence their household income to some degree. It is hoped that this study will provide both theoretical and practical implications for rural language strategies in the post-poverty alleviation period and rural revitalization in China.