Journal of Language: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistic, Literary, and Philosophical Inquiry Published by Leoman Publishing Co. LTD (UK-Registered), Journal of Language is a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the scholarly exploration of language in all its dimensions. Currently in the founding phase, the journal will serve as a rigorous and inclusive platform for research spanning linguistics, literary theory, translation studies, and philosophical approaches to meaning and discourse.
Urban Scenery, Lyrical Lingnan: A Review of Wen Yushe’s Gleaning Scenes and Sights
Wen Yushe’s poetry collection Gleaning Scenes and Sights（《物色撷英》） weaves together the natural landscapes, historical sites, human portraits, and reading reflections, which combine to reveal the characteristics of urban and rural Lingnan area, into a spiritual cartography that possesses both classical charm and contemporary resonance. This review takes the poem “Viewing the Horizon” as the entry point for aesthetic analysis, examining how the poet transforms everyday scenery into spiritual imagery, and traces this thread through the collection’s four sections to reveal his creative principle that “scenery is none other than mindscape”. Through close readings of representative works—“Muttering in the Tower” from the travel and nostalgia section, “The Elder Professor” from the human portraiture section, and “Encountering Lu You in Unrolling the Scroll” from the reading reflections section—this review demonstrates how the poet, with his precise yet spirited classical poetic language, channels Zong Baihua’s aesthetics and the classical Chinese poetic tradition, accomplishing a Lingnan poet’s literary-spiritual practice in a contemporary context. The collection is not merely a compilation of personal aesthetic experiences but also a manifesto of aesthetic education through poetry.
Digital platforms now routinely construct annual retrospectives—Spotify Wrapped, Audible Stats, and their equivalents on Chinese platforms like Ximalaya—that claim to reveal “who you truly are” through data. Existing scholarship has largely theorized this algorithmic self-narration through the lens of semantic traces: highlights, annotations, and content preferences that express intellectual judgments. This paper argues that such frameworks overlook a distinct and increasingly prevalent mode of self-formation grounded in auditory behavior. We introduce the concept of “prosodic engagement traces” (hereinafter “traces”)—digital footprints capturing how users pace, replay, skip, and modulate their listening tempo—as a category fundamentally different from semantic traces. Unlike semantic traces, which carry propositional content about what a user thinks, prosodic engagement traces register the bodily, rhythmic, and affective texture of how a user listens. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of play, Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative identity, Couper-Kuhlen and Wennerstrom’s conversation-analytic work on prosody, we propose a theoretical framework in which these traces facilitate a distinctive process of self-formation: “resonant recognition”. This is a non-narrative, aesthetic mode of self-encounter wherein the listener recognizes herself not through coherent life stories but through the felt familiarity of her own listening rhythms. Crucially, this process unfolds as “reflection without an other”: the algorithmic narration bypasses the dialogical encounter central to Gadamerian hermeneutics while simultaneously compressing the detour through textual distanciation that Ricœur deemed necessary for self-understanding. The empirical portion of the study operationalizes this framework through a hermeneutic analysis of platform-generated listening narratives, triangulated with a three-stage coding of 327 user-generated social media responses (from Weibo and Xiaohongshu) to their own listening retrospectives. Of these, six posts were selected for intensive hermeneutic analysis based on their theoretical richness; the remainder supported the broader coding framework. Findings reveal a distinct discursive pattern through which users articulate an “aesthetic self”—a self recognized in the grain of the voice, the rhythm of pausing, and the texture of tempo, rather than in the content of words. The paper concludes by theorizing how prosodic engagement traces reconfigure the hermeneutic circle under algorithmic conditions and proposes the cultivation of a “critical listening literacy” as a response to this emergent mode of digital subjectivation.
Infinity in a Finite Space: Emily Dickinson’ s Poetics of Space
This essay examines the poetics of space in Emily Dickinson’s poetry from three interconnected dimensions: cognitive construction of space, innovative visual poetic form, and material carrier of envelope poems. From the cognitive level of poetic content, Dickinson infuses boundless spiritual profundity into physically restricted carriers such as houses and coffins, breaking the inherent bondage of physical size via imaginative cognition and turning confined entities into gateway toward eternity. In terms of visual poetic form, her use of dashes, irregular line breaks and title-free layout fractures linear temporal logic, constructing multi-layered textual space and independent spiritual dimensions on the page. Regarding material practice, Dickinson consciously opens, cuts, and completely flattens envelopes into new shapes, transforming their constrained physical space into a dynamic compositional field where material boundaries actively shape and are shaped by the handwritten lines. By embedding expansive perception within limited poetic and physical spaces, Dickinson reveals spatial constraint as an advantageous condition for poetic infinite interpretation.
Hollow Voices, Fragile Bonds: Telephone and the Contingency of Modern Love in Vile Bodies
In Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh uses telephone dialogue as a consciously chosen narrative device that dramatizes the emotional atrophy unleashed when traditional order gives way to modern anarchy. This study explores how Waugh, through the medium of the telephone, uncovers the fragility of the love bond across three interrelated dimensions. First, with its instantaneous connection and abrupt termination, the telephone is itself an emblem of fluid modernity, exposing how the collapse of traditional identity anchors leaves individuals adrift, and incapable of forming authentic bonds in a transient age. Second, the telephone functions as a formal analogue to fortune itself, both delivering and registering the fragility of intimacy, and mirroring a world in which agency is supplanted by contingency. Third, the telegraphic telephone exchanges between the protagonists unravel the atrophy of emotional language, compressing feeling into monosyllabic utterances that suspend meaning between speech and silence while performing social disguise. Reading the novel across these dimensions, this study demonstrates that Vile Bodies internalizes the dissolution of order to produce a formal diagnosis of the affective alienation pervading the modern condition. Waugh’s formal conservatism is, in this respect, more radical than his reputation as a satirist allows.
Southernizing the North: Lived Precarity and Britain’s “Internal South” in Wang Bang’s The Texture of Hard Times
This article reads Wang Bang’s The Texture of Hard Times through the concept of “southernization” within the Global North, understood here as the production of peripheralized conditions within the capitalist core. Through a close analysis of Wang’s nonfictional narrative, it examines four interconnected dimensions of lived precarity: cross-class mobility and unstable labor, the sensory experience of inadequate housing, bodily need and shame in contexts of period poverty and fuel poverty, and localized practices of mutual aid. Wang’s migrant perspective reveals how neoliberal policies, particularly housing privatization and welfare retrenchment, have eroded the postwar social contract and rendered basic needs precarious for marginalized groups in the UK. By framing these conditions as an “internal South,” the article challenges rigid North–South binaries and argues that capitalist modernity distributes vulnerability not only across nations but also within them. Wang’s work further highlights how grassroots care networks offer fragile but meaningful forms of support within systemic insecurity, helping preserve dignity amid structural inequality.
Research on English Writing Teaching Reform Based on Multi-subject Collaborative Evaluation: A Case Study of the Intelligent English Writing Course
Driven by the new-era educational evaluation reform emphasizing process-based and developmental assessment, traditional college English writing teaching is constrained by teacher-dominated single evaluation, delayed feedback, and low student participation, which hinder the sustainable improvement of students’ writing competence. While artificial intelligence (AI) has facilitated innovative writing evaluation approaches, most existing studies merely adopt single AI or conventional teacher-peer evaluation, with few empirical explorations on progressive multi-subject evaluation models suitable for application-oriented universities. To fill this gap, this study takes the Intelligent English Writing course as the research object and constructs a four-stage progressive collaborative evaluation model integrating student self-evaluation, peer evaluation, critical AI optimization, and whole-process teacher diagnosis. A one-semester teaching intervention was conducted on four parallel classes. Pre-test and post-test writing scores as well as valid questionnaire data (N=59, Cronbach’s α=0.89) were used to examine its effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves students’ writing performance, learning engagement, metacognitive reflection, and critical feedback screening abilities, while effectively reducing their writing anxiety and optimizing the traditional classroom ecology. This study clarifies the auxiliary role and critical application principles of AI tools, balances technological empowerment and humanistic teaching, and establishes a replicable practical paradigm for intelligent writing instruction. It provides credible evidence and actionable references for college English writing teaching reform and optimized educational evaluation.
Exploration of the Dynamic Evaluation Model and Enhancement Pathways for Translation Practice Reports of English Majors in the Digital Intelligence Era
This study takes the undergraduate translation practice reports of English majors at South China Business College, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies as the research object, analyzing the current situation of the quality evaluation of undergraduate English majors’ translation practice reports, and proposes the evaluation framework of “AI quality + human completion” for undergraduate translation practice reports. It draws on the dynamic evaluation theory and puts forward a three-dimensional integrated evaluation model of “process–product–reflection”, and proposes specific enhancement pathways, so as to provide theoretical support and practical strategies for the translation practice reports of English majors to cope with the challenges in the digital intelligence era.
“I Can’t Argue Back”: Barriers to Rebuttal Writing Among Chinese EFL Learners
This study explores barriers to effective rebuttals in second language (L2) writing among Chinese EFL learners, examining their rebuttal performance, self-perceived reasons for poor performance, and links to class emotions. It involved 136 English-major sophomores from a Southeast China university, who received four-week rebuttal instruction integrated with critical thinking training via an “infusion” approach. Data were collected from TEM4 (a high-stakes test for Chinese English majors) prompt-based writing, open-ended questions on self-perceived reasons, and an emotion questionnaire measuring three positive emotions and five negative ones. Results showed 70.59% of participants either submitted ineffective rebuttals or failed to provide any rebuttals; key reasons included habit-related factors, competence-related factors, and idea-conflict factors. Participants reported more positive than negative emotions in rebuttal-writing classes, but emotions in rebuttal-writing classes had no significant correlation with their rebuttal performance. Through unprecedentedly uncovering the multiple reasons for ineffective and non-existent rebuttal writing and excluding emotional experience in rebuttal-writing classes as a reason, the study provides implications for L2 writing and critical thinking instruction.
Generative AI and the Transformation of Translation Education: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies
This systematic review examines how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) shapes translation education through a synthesis of 60 empirical studies published across 37 journals or edited volumes in the fields of translation and interpreting training, educational technology, and applied linguistics. Following the PRISMA framework, the review presents the overall profile of the included studies and analyzes them in relation to three questions concerning how GenAI has been defined, introduced, and used in translation education research, what kinds of learning-related outcomes have been reported, and what pedagogical conditions, learner factors, and ethical and technological boundaries appear to shape its role. The findings show that GenAI is already becoming part of translation-related teaching and learning, but not in one uniform or stable way. Across the studies reviewed, GenAI was introduced through multiple pedagogical roles, including translation assistant, feedback provider, revision scaffold, post-editing aid, and interactive learning partner. Reported outcomes were distributed across several domains, with relatively more positive findings in translation performance and in structured feedback or post-editing tasks, and more mixed findings in learner experience, AI literacy, and process-related domains. Compared with the pre-GenAI era, when technologies such as computer-assisted translation tools were more often treated as external resources and aids, translation education in the GenAI era increasingly positions GenAI as a pedagogical actor that participates in drafting, commenting, revising, simulating, and structuring learning activities, while still requiring human-in-the-loop oversight and judgment. At the same time, the review highlights the risk of ChatGPT-centered pedagogy and a gap between academic use and professional workflows. Overall, the review argues that GenAI should be understood not as a simple pedagogical solution, but as part of a broader reorganization of translation education.
Spelling Pronunciation: An Explanation in Terms of Exemplar Theory
In mainstream linguistic theory, spelling is not regarded as part of a word’s phonological representation. This raises the question how spelling pronunciations should be explained. This paper proposes that spelling pronunciations can be accounted for in a theory of linguistic representation in which different aspects of linguistic expressions, including their spelling, are simultaneously available in the mental representation of a word.
Analyzing Language of Depression: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Online Health Communication
This study develops a Depression Corpus with over 4.4 million tokens sourced from 5,167 threads and 20,783 posts in an online depression forum, utilizing R and RStudio for data collection. It investigates how individuals express emotions and construct narratives about depression in digital health communication. By employing a methodological framework combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the research utilizes tools such as Wmatrix4, Sketch Engine, and Wordsmith to explore semantic patterns within depression discourse. The analysis reveals key emotional constructs, enhancing understanding of both negative and positive sentiments related to mental health. This research contributes to improved recognition and support strategies for individuals experiencing depression, fostering a deeper comprehension of their experiences through linguistic analysis. Ultimately, it underscores the value of linguistic approaches in addressing complex psychological health issues.
From Detection to Revision: Identifying Coherence Errors in Chinese–English MT of Journalism via Thematic Progression
Machine translation (MT) of Chinese-English journalistic texts frequently suffers from discourse-level coherence errors that are undetectable by sentence-level metrics. This study proposes a theory-driven method to identify and revise such errors using thematic progression (TP) as a diagnostic framework. Taking the machine-translated version of Ideas of Journalism in Contemporary China produced by ChatGPT as an example, we extracted 156 clauses and identified two dominant TP patterns in the source text (constant theme and derived theme), and documented pattern-specific MT errors as follows: ambiguous reference and improper thematic shift under the constant pattern, and cohesion loss and information focus shift under the derived pattern. Based on these error types, we develop three post-editing strategies specification, combination, and amplification--each designed to repair a specific coherence failure while preserving the original TP structure. The findings demonstrate that TP theory provides an objective, replicable heuristic for detecting coherence errors in MT output and guiding targeted revision. This study contributes a practical framework for post-editing training and offers implications for discourse-aware MT evaluation.
Mirror of the “Other”: Western Views on China in The Canton Miscellany
Published in 1831, The Canton Miscellany is a special textual carrier intertwined with Sino-Western cultural collisions and colonial expansion before the Opium War. This study takes the existing five issues of The Canton Miscellany as the research object, and based on the “Other” theory and the perspective of Orientalism, reveals its dual characteristics as a cultural mirror of the Western community in China through textual content analysis and historical context restoration. It presents exotic descriptions of China during the Qing Dynasty, and implicitly contains the early penetration of colonial discourse. The Canton Miscellany constructed China as an “Other” opposed to Western modernity through a binary oppositional discourse system of progress vs. stagnation and civilization vs. barbarism. It not only reflects the cultural superiority of British colonizers in the 19th century, but also implies the deep intention of serving commercial expansion and colonial legitimation, thus providing media evidence for understanding the evolution of Western views on China in the first half of the 19th century.
Concepts and Methods of Transcultural Imagology: Western Images of China as an Example
The study of Western images of China in transcultural imagology unfolds across three levels: image, type, and prototype. While images in specific texts serve as the primary sources of analysis, focus is placed on the socio-historical process by which these images are programmed into overarching types, which function as the fundamental units for investigating the (re)production of Western images of China. Prototypes signify the inheritance and interrelation within lineages of images; they represent the basic, generally commensurable modes of understanding in the history of images—those that transcend individual texts and eras to remain embedded in the collective unconscious. The two primary modes of prototypes—utopianization and ideologization—provide the fundamental frameworks for interpreting the historical evolution of Western images of China. Transcultural imagology ultimately centers on these expressive and creative prototypes, analyzing the knowledge and power embedded in (images of) China as a discursive practice of Western modernity, as well as the discursive hegemony in transcultural interactions manifested within the modern world order. The prototypes of China as utopianized and ideologized images are linked to two forms of Orientalism; the tension between these two poles endows Western cultural expansion with its specific character. This is precisely the issue that warrants serious consideration in relation to the theme of Chinese cultural self-awareness.
Innovating Reading Materials Development Based on Generative AI Within the Backward Design Framework
Tailoring reading textbooks for personalized learning is essential. However, this process is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly for language teachers. This study fills this gap using generative AI to develop customized reading materials based on the backward design framework, which can assess five reading subskills in the teaching objectives. 288 EFL young learners were invited to respond to the reading materials generated by generative AI within 45 minutes. The teaching materials developed by AI were evaluated within the backward design framework. The result found that generative AI could develop customized reading materials for the desired reading subskills. Psychometric models revealed that the difficulties of reading materials were adaptive to students’ reading ability holistically and that the reading materials were unbiased toward different genders. Besides, English teachers believed that AI-generated reading materials were useful and helpful to language teaching and learning. This study provides a new method for developing personalized reading materials for language teaching, learning, and testing using generative AI, which has the potential to increase the usefulness and diversity of teaching materials efficiently.
Validating and Extending Ecological Affordance Theory: An Exploratory Mix-method Study Comparing Traditional and Flipped EFL Classrooms
Nowadays, the majority of second and foreign language (L2) classes around the world make use of technology-mediated instruction, with the flipped classroom (FC) being the most popular strategy. With the growth of flipped learning in L2 domains, several studies have examined the effectiveness of this instructional strategy in different contexts including English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. Nevertheless, most of the earlier inquiries have evaluated the effectiveness of flipped language classrooms in light of traditional, retrospective research approaches. Few studies have used emerging research approaches, including ecological affordance (EA), to assess the effectiveness of flipped language classes. To address this gap, this study examined the effectiveness of traditional and flipped language classes by investigating. In addition, we have to clarify that positive elements do not linearly lead to positive elements, i.e., negative interpretation of the UNIPUS platform may leads to positive actions, or vice versa. The transformation of different processes is more determined by individual differences, such as technology literacy, personal interest etc.(Lambton-Howard et al., 2021). Therefore, the interaction between the three original elements were extended to the nonlinear and complex interaction between five as indicated in Figure 2. Chinese EFL learners’ performance based on the three components of EA, namely perception, interpretation, and action. To do so, interviews, questionnaires, classroom observations, and narratives were employed in four different phases to collect the data. The study outcomes indicated that learners in flipped and traditional language classes did not differ significantly in terms of positive perception, interpretation, and actions. However, the flipped classroom group demonstrated a greater reduction in negative interpretations and actions. The results of this study may have some theoretical and practical implications for L2 researchers, language teachers, and educational administrators.
Towards Cognitive Intelligence in Financial Document Analysis: A Multimodal LLM Framework for Risk Reasoning and Due Diligence
Financial due diligence requires intensive analysis of vast unstructured documents (e.g., contracts, statements, invoices). However, traditional manual processing is inefficient, costly, and prone to subjectivity, and the existing automation solutions primarily focus on single-modal text recognition, lacking the capacity for joint understanding of multimodal features (e.g., layout, seals, table structures) and deep risk reasoning. This study proposes an end-to-end framework based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to bridge this gap. The framework not only performs accurate multimodal information extraction but also, integrates domain-specific knowledge (e.g regulatory clauses) to emulate expert-like reasoning. By constructing a dynamic risk knowledge graph that captures entities and relations across documents, it enables cross-document correlation analysis and anomaly detection. We will validate the framework on curated financial datasets, assessing both its information processing accuracy and risk diagnosis capability. Our contributions are threefold: 1) providing a novel computational linguistics solution that addresses the semantic and pragmatic challenges in financial document understanding; 2) advancing financial AI from perceptual to cognitive intelligence through explainable, knowledge-integrated reasoning; 3) offering a transparent, automated decision-support tool for high-stakes due diligence.
Mirrors and Lamps of The Waste Land: The Representational Dilemma and Perspectivism’s Redemption in T.S. Eliot’s Poetics
This article takes the language crisis in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a starting point to explore the profound impact of the 20th-century linguistic turn in philosophy on poetic creation and interpretation. It systematically traces the theoretical evolution from representationalism to expressionism, culminating in perspectivism. The representationalism of analytic philosophy, viewing language as a mirror of the world, excluded poetic and other non-referential discourse. Conversely, the expressionism of continental philosophy saw poetry as a lamp disclosing existence, emphasizing its truth-revealing function, yet it often fell back into metaphysical traps. The article proposes that a perspectivist poetics emerges at the intersection of Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s thought. This approach contends that poetry does not reflect or reveal a transcendental truth but constructs meaning through specific perspectives. Readers participate in the poetic language-game via the mechanism of “seeing-as”, co-generating poetic truth through multiple interpretations. The Waste Land, with its fragmented structure, polyphonic voices, and intertextual collage, perfectly embodies this perspectivist poetics—it rejects a single interpretation, inviting readers to experience the complex landscape of the modern waste land through shifts in perspective, making the poem itself a philosophical practice for training perception and reshaping worldviews.
Lament for the Marginalized: The “Other” Behind Animal Imagery in A Bird in the House
Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s short story collection A Bird in the House is rich in animal imagery. These images carry profound cultural connotations and are highly intertextualized with various marginalized individuals—or the “Other” in different social contexts within the fictional prairie town of Manawaka: the endangered loons symbolize Piquette, who is marginalized in terms of both ethnicity and gender; the horses of the night represent the economically marginalized Chris; and the half-husky stands for Harvey, who is marginalized in both economic status and family environment. The tragic fates of the animals and the marginalized characters are closely intertwined and reflect each other, refracting the writer’s sympathy for the vulnerable and her deep humanistic concern.
Research on the Discursive Construction and Identity of Homestay Tourism in the Context of Hakka Culture: A Case Study of Heyuan
Against the backdrop of rural revitalization and the integration of culture and tourism, homestay tourism has emerged as a significant pathway for revitalizing local cultural heritage and fostering rural economic development. In Hakka regions, exemplified by Heyuan, Guangdong—the “Hakka Ancient City”—the development of homestays serves as a crucial arena for the inheritance and reconfiguration of Hakka culture within a modern context. This study interrogates the central role of discourse in this process, exploring how multiple discursive agents—including official institutions, operators, and media—collectively construct a distinctive Hakka cultural identity. Furthermore, it examines how this discursively shaped experience influences tourists’ place identity and ultimate revisit intentions.To address these questions, the research employs a qualitative case study design grounded in Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Taking Heyuan as the primary site, the study systematically analyzes a corpus of official promotional texts, online reviews, and in-depth interviews with 15 operators and 20 tourists. The findings reveal that discourse serves as a core force in constructing cultural identity through narrative strategies centered on “authenticity,” “nostalgic memory,” and “local differentiation”. This discursive construction effectively fosters place identity by shaping cognitive understanding, evoking emotional resonance, and meeting functional expectations. Moreover, place identity acts as a critical mediator; a strong sense of identity significantly predicts revisit and recommendation intentions. By moving beyond macro-spatial analysis, this study unveils the micro-mechanisms of meaning-making that connect culture, place, and individual experience. It offers a novel theoretical perspective on tourism-driven identity formation and provides practical pathways for the sustainable development of ethnic tourism in broader Hakka regions through strategic discourse management.
An Experimental Study of the Positive Transfer of Cantonese Rusheng Syllable Structures on Unreleased Stops in English
Accurate pronunciation is of great significance for all language learners. Syllables of Rusheng, a prominent feature of Cantonese tones, are ended by stops with no audible release /p̚/, /t̚/, and /k̚/, which is highly similar to the phenomenon of unreleased stops in English Consonant-Consonant linking. However, previous studies on stops in Cantonese and English focused on the onsets or codas stops in monosyllabic words or theoretically presumed the difficulties Cantonese EFL learners may encounter by analyzing the similarities and differences of vowels and consonants in Cantonese and English. Therefore, the author conducted an experiment among three language groups. The results identify that there is a positive transfer from Cantonese Rusheng on English unreleased stops in phrases or even sentences in natural speech.
Framing Power, Making Meaning: Rethinking Metaphor Translation in Contemporary Chinese Political Discourse
Political metaphor has become one of the quiet engines of official Chinese rhetoric. It does not simply decorate policy language. It helps organise legitimacy, compress history into portable formulas, and project a future oriented moral horizon. Once translated, however, these metaphors enter a different ecology of reading, where the cues that make them persuasive at home may not be available, or may be read through quite different ideological expectations. This paper reviews scholarship on metaphor translation in contemporary Chinese political discourse and argues that a significant strand of this work has tended to frame translation as technical transfer rather than as public negotiation. Bringing functionalist, cognitive and discourse-oriented traditions into dialogue, the review foregrounds reception as the missing hinge between strategy and effect. Across the literature and a small set of emblematic cases drawn from widely circulated official translations, five recurring tensions are traced: semantic density, cultural embeddedness, strategic ambiguity, institutional constraint and reception drift. These tensions show why common strategies such as abstraction, elaboration and standardisation are never neutral fixes. They reshape what the metaphor can do, and for whom it can do it. The research therefore reframes political metaphor translation as a contested event of meaning making, situated at the intersection of language, ideology and global politics.
From Distance to Rupture to Bridging: Linguistic–Cultural Risk Mapping and Data-Intelligent Governance Mechanisms in Chinese Enterprises’ Expansion into Latin America
In the course of Chinese enterprises accelerating their expansion into Latin American markets, capital and productive capacity have achieved an unprecedented hard landing, yet language and culture are increasingly emerging as an implicit soft barrier. Existing studies mostly focus on institutional environment, political risk and macro-level strategic deployment, while discussions of linguistic and cultural factors tend to remain at a principled level and have not yet formed a systematic framework that can be incorporated into enterprise risk management systems. Adopting a conceptual research design, this study develops an analytical framework and a governance model to address this gap. Building on a review of research on language in international business and on language risk, this article establishes linguistic–cultural risk as an independent risk category and identifies four interrelated risk domains: institutional–compliance, organizational–coordination, market–narrative and data–algorithmic risk. The article introduces the dynamic analytical framework of distance–rupture–bridging and, from the perspectives of linguistic distance, distance in cultural memory and cognitive–narrative distance, constructs a linguistic–cultural risk map for Chinese enterprises entering Latin America. Further, the article conceptualizes generative artificial intelligence and intelligent language services as a new form of infrastructure for data-intelligent language governance, and proposes a closed-loop governance mechanism of identification–assessment–early warning–intervention–review, together with corresponding pathways for organizational embedding at the strategic, functional, project and cooperation levels. It argues that upgrading linguistic and cultural factors from a soft issue to a measurable and manageable, independent risk category not only helps enhance the business resilience of Chinese enterprises operating in Latin America, but also offers new theoretical perspectives and practical directions for the language services industry’s transformation from translation processing to risk-oriented language governance, and for foreign language education’s shift from single language competence cultivation to a tripartite curricular system of language competence + risk literacy + data-intelligent tool literacy.
Toward a Better Understanding of Developmental Pathway of Cognitive Wisdom: Exploring Its Interplay with Openness, Reflectiveness, and Orientation-to-learning
Wisdom has emerged as a critical educational objective in higher education, yet inconsistent outcomes across university programs have cast doubt on formal education’s ability to systematically cultivate wisdom—particularly in the cognitive dimension. This study investigated the dynamic relationships between key precursor factors (openness, reflectiveness, and orientation-to-learning) and wisdom scores in 305 university students enrolled in a wisdom-focused EFL program. Results demonstrated three key findings: (1) paired-samples t-tests revealed significant improvement in the judgment subdimension of cognitive wisdom; (2) structural equation modeling (SEM) identified openness and reflectiveness as foundational predictors of wisdom scores, with orientation-to-learning serving as a mediator; and (3) multi-group SEM confirmed the invariance of these relationships across gender groups. These results highlight the crucial role of creating optimal learning conditions that promote critical thinking for wisdom development, while offering practical guidance for designing gender-inclusive wisdom education programs.
“This Haiku Is Not a Haiku”: Rethinking Form and Textuality in International Haiku
This article aims to use a recently published poetry collection as a reference point to explore some of the major debates that have engulfed the poetry world since the internationalisation of Japanese haiku as a poetry form, which revolves around the following questions: what constitutes a proper haiku? What form in non-Japanese languages would best represent its original structures? Would a free form better express its original spirit? Crucially, can a verse that is not intended to be a haiku be labelled as such only for its visual or semantic implications?
Preserving Poetic Effect in Human–Machine Collaborative Translation of Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Family
The swift progress of artificial intelligence, exemplified by neural network models like GPT-4o, transcends literary boundaries, heralding novel human-machine collaborative models. The challenge of achieving translation efficiency without compromising poetic effect persists. Machine translation often overlooks the cultural imagery, rhetorical nuances, and emotional connotations that are essential to a literary text’s poetic appeal. Thus, this study assesses the efficacy of the collaborative translation mechanism in overcoming limitations, employing Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Family as a case study. A corpus of one hundred high-poetic-density sentence segments was selected for a comparative analysis across three translation modalities: machine translation, human-machine collaboration, and Goldblatt’s authoritative translation. Quantitative methods and case studies are utilised in the study to demonstrate the inclination of machine-generated text to flatten imagery, weaken rhetorical effects, and disrupt emotional continuity. The paper presents a collaborative approach in which machines process semantics and flag cultural terms. Human translators then intervene with cultural compensation, rhetorical correction, and emotional adaptation. The model significantly reduces the gap with professional translations, providing practical guidelines for translating rural Chinese literature in the AI era.
From “Dehumanised” to “Co-perpetrator”: The Translingual Reconstruction of Lin Yutang’s Thought in Hotta Yoshie’s War Perspective
Lin Yutang’s works were introduced to Japan in the 1930s and gained widespread circulation. Moving beyond previous one-dimensional diffusion models, this paper examines the reception of Lin Yutang by Japanese “postwar school” writer Hotta Yoshie as a case study, focusing on how he, drawing on his personal experiences in Shanghai, reconstructed Lin’s core concept critiquing human alienation— “dehumanized”—into a political-ethical concept for analyzing war responsibility: “co-perpetrator”. This transformation exemplifies the recipient’s subjective agency in transnational intellectual flows, profoundly deepening the complexity of postwar Japanese discourse on war responsibility.
Accuracy, Pleasure, and Musicality: Poe’s Influence on Elizabeth Bishop as Shown in “Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box”
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet renowned for her precise and restrained verse. Through a close reading of Bishop’s poem “Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box” and related poems from the posthumously published collection of the same title, this study aims to explore the formative influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Bishop’s poetic philosophy. It focuses on three key aspects of Poe’s impact: accuracy, pleasure, and musicality (rhythm). First, Poe’s advocacy for precision in poetry is reflected in Bishop’s meticulous and objective depiction of the physical world. Second, Poe’s theory of poetic pleasure resonates with Bishop’s emotionally subtle yet sincere expression. Finally, Poe’s emphasis on rhythm and sound significantly shaped Bishop’s approach to musicality and structural rhythm in her own verse. By examining these elements, this essay reveals a previously unexplored connection between Poe’s poetics and Bishop’s poetics, particularly in the integration of precision, emotion and musicality in her works.
Beyond Humanism: A Postmodernist Reading of Skepticism in The Golden Notebook
This paper examines the predominant research approaches to The Golden Notebook and argues that these approaches fail to reveal the novel’s core essence. Lessing was not merely a humanist preoccupied with marginalized or vulnerable groups. Rather, she consistently adopted a holistic mindset to question phenomena that people take for granted—nostalgia, the reliability of writing, and the status of science. She sought to inspire independent thinking rather than passive conformity.
Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject: Care of the Self, Truth and the Art of Existence
This paper examines Michel Foucault's interpretation of the subject, with a particular focus on the complex relationship between the subject and truth. Foucault’s approach analyses how individuals historically conduct themselves as subjects in relation to truth through specific techniques and within frameworks of power and knowledge. It identifies three primary historical modes of self-formation: the gnomic self, the gnostic self, and the epistemological self. Foucault argues that across these modes, subjects are shaped by the interplay between the techniques of domination and the techniques of the self. The paper traces Foucault’s intellectual trajectory, showing how his earlier work on power/knowledge dynamics and discursive formations laid the groundwork for his later turn to the subject. His ultimate concern is the “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou), an ancient Greco-Roman concept he revitalises against Platonic recollection and Christian renunciation models. Care of the self involves spiritual practices (askēsis), such as studying nature, self-knowledge, and truth-telling (parrhesia), aimed at achieving self-mastery, freedom, and an aesthetic of existence. For Foucault, this art of living, where the subject actively shapes itself as a work of art oriented towards truth and virtue, represents the path to restoring the subject’s fundamental relationship with itself.