UM professor’s linguistics paper contributes to Cantonese-English translation

A paper written by Ronald Fong, an assistant professor from the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau (UM), has been published in the renowned academic journal Translation Research and Teaching. Titled ‘A Cognitive Analysis of the Cantonese Motion-Directional Construction and its Implications for Translation’, the article contributes to translation studies on equivalent structures between English and Cantonese. It is also the only article in the journal that discusses topics related to the Cantonese language.

The paper explores a fresh approach that falls within the broad framework of cognitive linguistics and its variant of Construction Grammar. Different from other research studies that use traditional approaches, this papers suggests a Catenative Analysis of the motion-directional construction and its consequences of signalling conceptual subordination. This new perspective on construction is among the few applications of cognitive linguistics to the study of Cantonese, which is expected to create an impact on translation and interpreting between English and Cantonese.

Translation Research and Teaching is sponsored by the Chinese Association of Cognition and Translation Studies and is published by Chinese Popular Science Press. The journal aims to fill the gap in the research areas of cognition, translation, and interpreting, and to publish results of cutting-edge research studies.