On December 4, 2021, the 5th ESP Interdisciplinary Innovative Youth Forum, which was hosted by Shanghai Science and Technology Translation Society kicked off online, announcing the award winners. Nearly 520 experts from research institutes and young scientists from enterprises and institutions participated in the pre-call for papers. Finally, with the careful guidance of Mr. Guan Xinchao, Qin Kaiyu, a second-year Master of Translation from the Department of Translation, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, won the only Grand Prize in the student category of this forum, and Guo Xiaoyu, a fourth-year undergraduate student from the Department of English, School of Foreign Languages, won the second prize in the student category.

 

 

Since October 2017, the ESP Interdisciplinary Innovative Youth Forum organized by Shanghai Science and Technology Translation Society has been successfully held for five consecutive sessions. With English for Specific Purpose as the main line, the forum aims to strengthen communication and dialogue between science and technology and humanities, encouraging young scholars and scientists, especially young translators, to use ESP language as a link to carry out interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary teaching and research and academic theoretical activities.  The forum also provided a high-quality and high-level academic exchange platform for the participants to understand the frontier technology in various fields, share their research results and explore the innovation channel of domestic translation research and application in the new era.

 

 

Qin Kaiyu's paper, "Image of China in "China's Action against the New Epidemic", which won the Grand Prize, used mainly corpus analysis methods and Python programming technology to investigate empirically the differences in the construction of China's image between the original Chinese text of the government white paper "China's Action against the New Epidemic" and its official English translation, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to summarize the translation strategies and potential motivations behind the differences. The study involves the interaction of various factors such as language differences, readers' expectations, and different national contexts.

 

(Partial Python code written by Kaiyu Qin for the paper)

 

Qin Kaiyu is currently a second-year graduate student in the Department of Translation, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, having finished his undergraduate studies in the Department of Translation, Fudan University. His thesis, "Translation Quality Assessment Based on Genette's Theory on Narratology: A Case Study of Three Translations of The Madman's Diary," won the title of Outstanding Thesis of 2020.

 

(Qin Kaiyu at the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Memorial Museum)

 

Guo Xiaoyu, who won the second prize, presented her thesis on "Analysis of Chinese Women's Image in Social Change". With Python, the paper explores the theme of the Women's Day articles published in People's Daily between 1947 and 2021 by corpus and discourse analysis, aiming to explore the changes of Chinese women's image through time by analyzing sentence length, type-token ratio, high frequency vocabulary, and theme modeling. The results showed the dynamic changes in the image of Chinese women over the past decades, from the earliest days of the being liberated, to the laborers, and then to the independent individuals pursuing gender equality, providing more thoughts on the changing status of Chinese women in the international community.

 

(The semantic network diagram built by Xiaoyu Guo in the award-winning paper)

 

Xiaoyu Guo is currently a student of English Linguistics in the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. During her undergraduate years, she was awarded many honors such as the F Prize of 2021 American Student Mathematical Modeling Competition, Outstanding Student Cadre of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dong's Scholarship, and Yang Yongman Scholarship. Her innovation practice project of "Exploring the Theme of Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro's Works by Taking "Don't Let Me Go" as an Example" won SJTU Excellent innovation practice project.

 

(Guo Xiaoyu at the Science and Technology Museum)

In the 5th ESP Interdisciplinary Innovative Youth Forum, students from the School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University flexibly used their strengths in language while applying their classroom knowledge with the aid of computer technology, which vividly embodied SFL’s concept of promoting teaching and research through competitions.