Professor Xu Jianzhong explained “Geography, Language and Translation”

On the morning of September 5th, Prof. Xu Jianzhong from College of Foreign Languages, Tianjin University of Technology, came to SFLL and held a wonderful lecture named “Geography, Language and Translation” for SFLL students. This lecture mainly discussed on three aspects as follows: the basic content of man-land relationship theory; the relationship between the origin of language and geography; and the issues we need to notice in language translation.

At first, Professor Xu introduced the man-land relationship theory. He proposed that human and land have an impact on each other. On the one hand, the geographical environment forms customs and habits of human; on the other hand, human shows regional disparity under different geographical conditions. Furthermore, he put forward that the difference between language and culture is an important display of regional disparity. To make students have a better understanding on the theory, he further explained his viewpoint by listing relevant issues such as religion, the origin of agriculture, capital founding in ancient times and by citing an old Chinese saying “The customs are different even in the neighboring village”.

Professor Xu believed that human language and culture develop around specific geographical environment; and meanwhile, geographical environment also creates, nourishes, enriches language and culture just as what water does to the soil. Doing research from the perspective of man-land relationship in geography, we can truly grasp the source of learning relationship between language and translation. He explained the relationship between emergence of language and geography by enumerating several examples on the difference between Chinese and English languages: firstly, English proverbs always reflect the worthlessness of water because the place where the English language originated is nearby the sea, while Chinese proverbs always depreciate earth because Chinese originates from inland; secondly, there is no concept of “wushu” in English and “tank” in Chinese originally; thirdly, the concept of “dragon” in English is different from that of “Long” in Chinese. All these vivid and concrete examples along with the explanation given by Professor Xu in a profound but simple way provided a brand new perspective for learning languages.

The conscientious attitude and extensive knowledge of Professor Xu impressed the students and help them better understand language and translation as well as of our college motto of “Academic Excellence, Ethical Nobility”.