On Teaching Untranslatable Expressions: Cases from Chinese and English

In this talk, I will present the framework of the Intercultural Irritations Project, which I conducted with Juliane House and a team at Dalian University of Foreign Language. In the Project, we examine intercultural irritations triggered by the use of seemingly 'simple' but pragmatically complex and often untranslatable expressions, by approaching them through L2 learning difficulties. I will illustrate the operation of this framework by using various case studies, such as an inquiry dedicated the phenomenon of greeting in English, which can be surprisingly challenging for speakers of other languages, such as Chinese. By 'greeting' I mean the seemingly 'simple' act of choosing conventionalised expressions at the opening of an encounter. Following pilot interviews with Chinese learners of English who reported puzzlement concerning greeting in English, I pursue a two-fold approach to explore conventions of greeting in English and Chinese. Another case involves uses of 'don't worry' by Chinese speakers of English, which may trigger intercultural irritations. I investigate such problematic uses from a contrastive angle, by considering whether they relate to the fact that in Chinese there are two expressions which may be equivalents of English 'don't worry: fangxin › ' (lit. 'ease your heart') and bie-danxin #l tz/ (lit. 'don't burden your heart').

Dániel Z. Kadár (MAE, D.Litt, FHEA, PhD) is Ordinary Member of Academia Europaea. He is Chair Professor and Director of the Center for Pragmatic Research at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China. He is also Research Professor at the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Maribor. He is author of many books and edited volumes, published with publishing houses of international standing such as Cambridge University Press.

He is co-editor of Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary

Journal. His research interests include applied linguistics and pragmatics.