Diplomacy relies on both verbal and non-verbal meaning-making. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, this study examines the material-textual and visual aspects of some diplomatic note translations in Anglo-Chinese diplomatic history. It finds that both governments attempted to manipulate the form and character positioning of the translations, taking them to be political signs of national status in a power contest. In turn, the highly interactive translation processes contributed to the emergence of a diplomatic reality of Anglo-Chinese equality and the introduction of new diplomatic ideas and practices into China. This study calls for more attention to the translational aspects of polysemiotic communication in diplomacy.
Abstract: This paper argues that the translation of philosophical texts is not a technical exercise but an interpretive act, drawing on the experience of translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into Mongolian.Philosophical translation differs from both technical and literary translation. Unlike technical translation, it cannot rely on standardized terminology, since philosophers frequently assign new meanings to ordinary words or repurpose existing terms for their own systems. Unlike literary translation, it must prioritize conceptual precision and the logical structure of the argument over aesthetic effect. As Parks observes, philosophers “use ordinary words in a new, technical sense,” making it impossible to translate without first understanding the thinker's system as a whole. This means that every translational choice reflects a philosophical reading of the source text, and the translator, as Rée argues, “cannot duck the duty of interpretation. This interpretive dimension is illustrated through two key terms in the Tractatus. The German Satz, which in everyday usage simply means “sentence,” carries an interconnected cluster of meanings in Wittgenstein's text, including proposition, statement, and remark. The choice to render it consistently as “proposition” rather than “sentence” reflects an alignment with the analytic tradition and with Russell's framing of the work as a contribution to logical philosophy. The German Bild, while meaning “picture” or “image” in everyday usage, is the central term of Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning. Comparison of English and Russian translations reveals that the choice between “картина” and “образ,” or between “the form of representation” and “the pictorial form,” reflects not stylistic preference but divergent philosophical readings of what kind of thing a Bild is in Wittgenstein's philosophical system. Rather than following any single source translation throughout, our Mongolian translation drew selectively on five English and Russian versions according to what each context demanded. This practice is itself evidence that translation is interpretation.
诗歌指的是一种追求灵魂的珍贵表达和文字的优雅的审美潮流，它是一种抒情史诗的 写作形式，用简短、有节奏的诗句记录人的思想和想象，创造了一种特殊的体 ，并根据语言的结构特点，以固定的篇幅和联系组织诗节。我们坚持到翻译诗歌蒙古诗歌的独特性，必须按照保留中国诗歌独特性的原则上蒙古诗歌形式的基础上进行翻译。
In this paper, the sentences were selected from the works “Solitude” (2018) translated by Kenneth Lindy and “Gantsaardal” (1972) by S. Erdene, and a comparative analysis was conducted based on the information structure of sentences. In any language, the information structure of a text is determined by the Theme–Rheme (given - new) order within the sentence. In English, the thematic progression is typically positioned at the beginning of the sentence, followed by the rhematic (new) information, as explained by M.A.K. Halliday. In contrast, in the relatively flexible word order of Mongolian, the rhematic information consistently follows the thematic information; in other words, the rhematic information develops and expands on the basis of the theme, forming the communicative structure, as noted by D. Erdenesan. Based on the common features of sentence information structure in the two languages, this study explores the possibility of explaining semantic transformations in translated texts by modeling invariant features through vector-based analogical models.
