Thinking Chinese Translation explores the ways in which memory, general knowledge, and creativity (summed up as ‘schema’) contribute to the linguistic ability necessary to create a good translation. The course develops the reader’s ability to think deeply about the texts and to produce natural and accurate translations from Chinese into English.

This detailed, chronological study investigates the rise of the European fascination with the Chinese language up to 1615. By meticulously investigating a wide range of primary sources, Dinu Luca identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing.

Foreign Accents sets forth a historical poetics of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the U.S. from the early twentieth century to the present. With readings of works by Ezra Pound, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Ha Jin, and John Yau, this study charts the dimensions of Asian American verse as an evolving and contested counterpoetic formation.

Chinese is the most commonly spoken language in the world and one of the very few contemporary languages whose history is documented in an unbroken tradition extending back to the second millennium. Compared with Western languages, Chinese has a typology with distinguished features in sound system, syntax, and discourse that have a strong impact on Chinese linguistics studies and language learning.

The book introduces Chinese culture to readers of English, using poetry from the various periods rendered into English verse to bring back to life past Chinese society as it developed from about 1000 B.C to the form we see today.