English and Chinese are both culturally rich languages, and both contain many linguistic phenomena. These rich linguistic phenomena both originate in and contribute to the development of culture, giving it more ways of expression and connotation. However, it is also these rich linguistic phenomena and the cultural contexts in which they are embedded that make the process of translating the two languages into each other so difficult to handle.

This project illustrates the boundaries between Chinese and Western languages and tells the story of the translation gap faced between Chinese characters as ideographs and English as an alphabetic script. Translation is a process of re-creation of language transformation. Due to the differences in historical background, social customs, religious culture, and ideology among the peoples of the world, a linguistic and cultural gap is created when a concept, thing or phenomenon that is characteristic of one language does not find a counterpart or similar expression in another language.

The overarching theme for this year is distribution. I define it as the act of the allocation process that occurs when a person receives resources. The process of translation is accompanied by the decoding and loss of information. When we communicate across cultures, translation activities suffer from blurred boundaries between English and Chinese expressions and from lexical barriers. Therefore, this project deals with redistribution of semantic information in Chinese translation (where semantic refers to the semantic association between textual components as a concept in linguistics), combining the theory of semantic pointing and the theory of valence grammar with translation practice in five aspects: semantic redirection, semantic displacement, semantic fusion, semantic separation, and semantic grid reallocation.

In the field of sociolinguistics, where identity is a discursive construct and language is a marker of identity, heterogeneous cultures have given rise to an identity crisis for me. Names are identifiers that distinguish individuals from groups. When I explain the origin of my name to those from other cultures, the limitations of the translation process challenge me to think about how to convey the cultural meaning of the original language, despite the cultural differences between East and West. Based on J&Y Latin Letter Theory, I wanted to design a new version of my first name. The combination of media relies on the design of Chinese strokes, Latin letters, and the choice of different types of paper, from single to multiple, deconstructing and reinterpreting the symbolic language of 杭 with the aim of crossing cultural barriers and promoting cultural exchange.