On December 25, at the invitation of the College of Foreign Studiesat NJAU, Professor GuBaotong of Georgia State University visited our college and made a speech to graduate students, titled ‘Translator in the Mindset of a Technical Communicator’.
First, Professor Gubriefly introduced his wonderful academic experience, and asked how many students are there majoring in translation. The lecture listed genres of technical writing from six aspects, namely ‘the definition of technical writing’, ‘the development and required qualification of technical writing’, ‘translating as writing’ and ‘writing as translating’, in order to make the concept of technical writing clear. He also indicated that technical writing has not yet become a concrete subject but has great potential. Professor Gu has long been studying and teaching in American universities, and all his English teaching methods made the lecture a spectacular visual feast for graduate students.
Professor Gupointed out that the difference between technical writing and translation is fromthe understanding of perspectives of ideology, culture, rhetoric, society, economy and politics. ‘Translating as writing’ refersthat the source text by means of an auxiliary tool in the creative process of this translation is to be translated into other languages more easily, eliminating the need for the process of re-processing. This process requires not only the transformation of author and translator, but also their new abilities, such as the ability to understand the cultural and technological context, the use of bi-cultural perspectives and the ability to maintain relationships between team members. Professor Gustressed that translating is equal to writing from the perspective of technical writing. Technical writing and translationnot only play a role in the field of information transmission and service, but also translators’ interpretation of source text and choice of rhetorical devices. It is a process of interpretation and re-interpretation,de-contextualization and re-contextualization,as well as a behavior of recreation.
Through the relationship between technical writing and translation, Professor Gutold us that being a qualified translator requires cross-cultural writing skills, computer software operation abilities, knowledge of language services, technical expertise in specific fields and abilities of project management. In his view, in spite of numerous challenges such as lack of identification, low academic status, existence of misunderstandings, there exists great potential and broad prospects for development of technical translation.In addition, Professor Gu explained challenges of technical writing and translation on the conceptual level, the requirestheory of technical writing, practical application ability and related knowledge in detail.In conjunction with his teaching experience, he advised us to learn about different disciplines to improve our writing skills. Finally, Professor Gu put forward the vision that he believed that only the combination of technical writing and translationis the correct path of prosperity and development of future English in China.
In the end, with talks entering into a question and answer session, some graduate students raised questions and Professor Gu patiently answered them. The lecture was well received and greatly broadened the horizons of graduate students, which provided a new perspective of translation and benefited us all.Through this seminar, graduate students gainedknowledgeonhow to improve their writing skills and have recognized their lack of knowledge on the subject, and will study harder!
Professor GuBaotong got a master’s degree in Commerce and Technical English Writing in Iowa State University in 1994, and obtained a doctoral degree in Rhetoric and Writing in Purdue Universityin 2000. From 1999 to 2002, he served as an assistant professor and director of the Department of Technical English writingat Eastern Washington University.Since 2002, he has taught at Georgia State University. In addition, he acted as director of the Basic English Department in Georgia State University from 2008 to 2010 and served as Dean of the Confucius Institute at Georgia State University from 2010 to February 2015. In the past ten years, he has devoted himself to studying business English, technical English writing, rhetoric comparative studies, inter-cultural communication, information technology application andwriting and so on. Courses taught by him include English composition, business English writing, technical andintroductionto technical English writing for graduate students and doctors, e-writing, publication, digital media rhetoric and writing pedagogy.
