On the afternoon of May 26, 2023, Ren Dongsheng, professor and doctoral advisor from Ocean University of China, visited the School of English Language & Culture and the School of Translation Studies, and gave a lecture entitled “The Connotation of ‘Country’ and ‘Practice’ in the Concept of National Translation Practice and its English Translation” for teachers and students from the two schools. The lecture was hosted by Li Xianhua, associate dean of the School of English Language & Culture.

The lecture mainly includes the following content: First, looking at the history of large-scale, institutional, and institutionalized translation practices around the world, it can be found that translation practices initiated, led, sponsored, and supervised by the “state” are the mainstream of translation history. This kind of state behavior in which the state achieves strategic goals through translation practice is called “national translation practice”. As an academic language of translation created by Chinese scholars in the past decade, it is a translation concept based on the investigation and description of the phenomena of national translation behaviors, organizations, methods and other aspects in the history of translation at home and abroad, and has been widely recognized by domestic scholars.

Second, local translation terminology needs to go through the process from discourse cognition to discourse identification, and the standardization of foreign translation of new terms is an important part of its internationalization. The foreign translation of terms with Chinese characteristics should not only pay attention to the “Chinese school” of term translation, so as to spread the original achievements of Chinese translation studies, but also improve the inter-lingual transmission of terms that are connected between China and the west, translatable and transferable, cognitively consistent and identificationally reached, so as to win the recognition of international translation studies. In the concept of “national translation practice”, the connotation of “state” involves the three-dimensional “subject → object → function” of national translation, while “practice” reflects the three-dimensional “guidance → organization → goal” of national translation. Through the comparative analysis of several English-French translations of “national” and “practice”, it can be seen that the appropriate English-French translation of “national translation practice” is STP (State Translation Program).

The lecture came to a successful conclusion in the heated discussion.