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Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen: On translation studies (Part I)

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Article

Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen:

On translation studies (Part I)*

Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma

Abstract
In this interview, Bo Wang first asks Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen about the sig-
nificance for applying Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to translation studies.
They also discuss various topics including the linguistic turn in translation studies,
differences between prescriptive and descriptive studies in translation, and Matthies-
sen’s (2001, 2014) studies on translation, i.e. the environments of translation and
metafunctional translation shift. Finally, some directions for future research are sug-
gested by Christian Matthiessen.

Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics; translation studies; linguistic

turn; prescriptive and descriptive studies; environments of
translation

Introduction
The transcript is based on the third session of an on-going series of inter-
views with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen beginning from September, 2016
in his office at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. As a leading scholar
in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Christian Matthiessen has been a
close research collaborator of Michael Halliday since the 1980s, and has made
great contributions to SFL. We hope that the publishing of these interviews
will help disseminate his opinions on the different areas of linguistics, to
introduce his theories in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and to give advice

Affiliations
Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Yuanyi Ma: Guangdong Polytechnic of Science and Technology.

Bo Wang: Sun Yat-sen University.

email: bo.wang@connect.polyu.hk (corresponding author)

lhs vol 13.1-2 2017  201–217 https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.37422

©2019, equinox publishing
202     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

to researchers new in the field of linguistics. The interviews cover various

topics, while three of them are on translation studies and SFL. In this inter-
view, we not only raise general questions such as the significance of the area,
linguistics and translation as well as future gaps in research, but also high-
light Christian Matthiessen’s own works on translation studies.

1. Significance of studying translation from the SFL

perspective
Bo Wang: Let me ask a general question first. What insights can we have by
studying translation from the SFL perspective? What is the significance of
these studies?

Christian Matthiessen: It is about how you conceive of translation. No matter

how you look at it, translation is in the first instance a linguistic process.
Given that it is a linguistic process (you might also say it is a metalinguistic
process), you would certainly want to illuminate it as a linguistic process. So,
you look around for a theory of language that has something to say about lan-
guage as potential, language as process, and language as instance. Language,
very broadly conceived, is language in context. What you want is a holistic
theory engaging with language, with comprehensive descriptions that will
allow you to reason about both the source language and the target language.
That is a very general term of what kind of theory we want to bring to
the linguistic study of translation. SFL is a holistic theory of language in
context, and it has certain key features. One is that it is meaning-oriented.
Descriptions of particular languages have been text-based since the begin-
ning. Meaning-oriented means paying attention to different kinds of mean-
ing, seeing how they are unified and balanced in text.
Also very importantly, what we talk about is another context – the orien-
tation towards the paradigmatic axis. SFL conceives of language as a resource
organized as choices available to speakers and listeners (or writers and read-
ers). These are the key elements you need in reasoning about translation and
understanding translation, both in terms of the meaning potential of the
source language, the meaning potential of the target language, recreating
meanings in the course of translation, and recreating meanings in context.
Even if nothing has been done from an SFL point of view regarding trans-
lation, these features of SFL would present it as an interesting candidate. But
in fact, there is a long history going back to the 1950s, not on human trans-
lation, but on machine translation. Halliday (1956) has worked on the notion
of mechanical thesaurus as an alternative to the traditional conception of a
dictionary in the context of the machine translation project he was involved
in the 1950s, which was directed by Margaret Masterman. The notion of
 Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma     203

mechanical thesaurus is precisely thinking of language as a resource orga-

nized paradigmatically, not as a list of entries, but rather as a network of
alternatives in lexical meaning. You could then give up the whole conception
of what you need when you look for an interpretation of the source text, and
then look for the recreation of the choices of meaning in the source text when
you move to the target language.
These are very general features. When you go beyond the 1950s into the
1960s, you will see people began to engage with human translation, like Ian
Catford (1965) and Michael Halliday (1962). In the last 25 years, there were
more people doing research using SFL in translator training in different parts
of the world and constantly with different language pairs. That has been
successful.
Then you may look around other theories of language, on the one hand
seeing whether they have potential candidates for illuminating translation,
and on the other hand seeing whether some work actually has been done with
the respect of translation. It is fair to say that the only major theory of lan-
guage where translation has been taken seriously from the start is Systemic
Functional Linguistics. That is important in seeing translation as part of what
a linguistic theory has to account for.

2. A linguistic turn in translation studies

Bo Wang: In the field of translation studies, there are many ‘turns’, such as
the cultural turn in the 1980s (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990) and the sociolog-
ical turn (e.g. Simeoni, 1998; Gouanvic, 2005; Wolf and Fukari, 2007). Has
there ever been a linguistic turn?

Christian Matthiessen: It is an interesting question. Both Eugene Nida (e.g.

1964) and Ian Catford (1965) took steps that could initiate a linguistic turn
in different ways in the 1960s. Nida was in particular in the context of Bible
translation. Catford, more generally, conceived of linguistic translation stud-
ies as one aspect of typological comparative linguistics and general linguis-
tics, and wrote about that in his monograph in 1965. From the 1960s onwards,
other people also did that, and conceived of translation in that context. Later
there was a reaction against Catford in certain quarters.
If I may be permitted to make a remark, looking back on this as an out-
sider to translation studies institutionalized as a distinct separate discipline,
it struck me over the years to see the extraordinary efforts people would go to,
so as to avoid actually engaging with language in translation studies. There
were theories of translation competence and so on. I am not saying they were
not useful, but they did not actually engage with the primary phenomenon
and the most difficult phenomenon, i.e. language, the multilingual meaning
204     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

potential, and the multilingual processing. People find all sorts of ways of
not engaging with them. That is a shame and is even bordering on a tragedy,
because there is so much that still needs to be explored and researched as far
as translation goes in a linguistic perception.
Also, various aspects that have been discussed under culture and trans-
lation competence and so on are in fact simply a broad part for a theory
empowered and not driven by the conception of language in context. I found
it much more productive to try to keep coming back to ground the explo-
ration of translation, even if one is concerned with translator competence
or culture in a general theory of language in context. If you slide up and
down the cline of instantiation, Michael Halliday (e.g. 1991, 1992) has put it
all there. Translation is something going on, starting with the instance end of
the cline of instantiation, and ending up with the instance, i.e. text in context
of situation. But the concerns with culture – that just means you slide up the
cline of instantiation through the context of culture or meaning potentials in
context of culture. It is all there on the map.
If you talk about interpreters, in particular simultaneous interpreters,
things like the concern with translator memory and memory capacity are
even more central. But that is again there in the general theory of language as
a fourth order system – semiotic system that is activated socially and embod-
ied biologically. It is part of the conception of language as a fourth order
system that also manifested socially, biologically, and ultimately physically
(Halliday and Matthiessen, 2006).
So, there is every reason to be very optimistic about the possibilities of
making contact with the kind of text/discourse analytic work that has been
done in Systemic Functional Linguistics and studies that record keystrokes
and eye movement. This is work that has been done in collaboration between
Fabio Alves and his group in Belo Horizonte, Federal University of Minas
Gerais (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, UFMG) (e.g. Alves, 2003;
Alves and Campos, 2009; Alves and Gonçalves, 2013; Alves, Szpak, Gon-
çalves, Sekino, Aquino, Castro, Koglin, Fonseca, and Mesa-Lao, 2016), and
Erich Steiner and his group at the Universität des Saarlandes (e.g. Hansen-
Schirra, Neumann, and Steiner, 2012). This kind of work links these two ways
of understanding translation, and is very interesting (e.g. Alves, Pagano, Neu-
mann, Steiner, and Hansen-Schirra, 2010).

3. Prescriptive and descriptive studies in translation

Bo Wang: Talking about translation theories, there are a great deal of studies
on translation, including many of those in mainland China, which are pre-
scriptive rather than descriptive. Are our SFL-based studies descriptive or
prescriptive?
 Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma     205

Christian Matthiessen: It is an interesting notion. If you look at the general

conception of theory in science, where theory is in that sense a short term for
scientific theories, then prescription has no business being part of it. Prescrip-
tion is something that comes out of scientific theory based on the insights of the
understanding as a way of intervening in an almost engineering way.
Halliday (2001) talks about this in an article in the volume edited by
Collin Yallop and Erich Steiner, where he compares this linguistic notion
of theory in translation with the prescriptive one that translators may often
want. But I think the problem is: if you start with the prescriptive focus, then
it will essentially be folk notions or practitioner’s notions that are not really
grounded in empirical research. When you do empirical research, you will
find what the issues are, then you will be in a position to intervene translation
training with guidelines and so on.
One can draw a parallel with communication and healthcare (e.g. Mat-
thiessen, 2013; Slade, Manidis, McGregor, Scheeres, Chandler, Stein-Parbury,
Dunston, and Matthiessen, 2015). We know that in training healthcare prac-
titioners, it would be very beneficial to have courses in effective communica-
tion. But to be able to do that, you need to actually research it first. So, you
need to understand what is going on and where the problems arise. Once you
know this, you can begin to move towards effective intervention.
Exactly the same applies in translation. You cannot actually develop effec-
tive guidelines until you know a lot about actual translation, both as product
(source text and target text), but also as process. This issue comes up when I
was involved in the MA program in translation at Macquarie University. Stu-
dents want something prescriptive, but I think you are doing them a much
better service if you are giving them the tools to actually examine and diag-
nose issues in translation themselves. That is why we had a course on text
analysis for translators. You give them the tools to examine the source text
and the target text. Once you examine, you will see what is going on; you can
possibly begin to evaluate it; you can compare translations and so on. I think
that is the way to go.

4. The environments of translation

Bo Wang: Now let’s talk about your works on translation studies. In 2001,
you published a book chapter entitled ‘The environments of translation’
(Matthiessen, 2001). What are the environments of translation?

Christian Matthiessen: It started with a colloquium or workshop that Erich

Steiner and Collin Yallop put together for a congress in 1998. They invited
a number of us. We had the presentation, discussions and so on. That was
a good preparation for the book that they edited (Steiner and Yallop, 2001).
206     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

I have a lot of personal and informal experiences in translation. It was not

something that had been a research area of mine, but I had various resources
about it, because I came from a family background of different languages. For
example, sight translation was part of my childhood experience. I had a half
niece-in-law, Vibeke Emond, who was a professional translator from Japa-
nese into Swedish and Italian into Swedish. Also, my half brother and half
sister-in-law both did translation work as outsiders’ activity. It was very much
part of the family experience background. I also have a multilingual family
on my mother’s side. So, when I was given this task and when I was invited
in 1998, I thought it would make sense in a way. One way I was thinking was
to update Ian Catford’s (1965) monograph, which was based on pre-Systemic
Functional Linguistics – Scale and Category Theory (Halliday, 1961). It had
various notions in place. But it did not have metafunction and a final version
of the stratification of language in context. It did not have the organization
around the paradigmatic axis – system networks. So, there are a number of
very interesting and rich developments since Catford (1965) that I felt would
feed into thinking about translation from a standpoint of linguistic theory,
specifically Systemic Functional Linguistic theory.
I do not quite remember how I arrived at this, but what a general theory
of language in context gives you is a very clear way of talking about differ-
ent environments, from the broadest environment to the narrowest environ-
ment. The traditional discussions like literal translation versus free translation
could be replaced, or at least illuminated by actually locating them in terms
of the environments in which they were operated. That was inspired by illus-
trations from the 1960s by Michael Halliday’s (1966: 31) examples of transla-
tion between languages at different ranks. What I was saying is: the notion of
the rank scale proving different environments in certain sense applies all the
way. So, the question is: how much information is available when you make
choices in translation depends on the environment you have access to. In so-
called literal translation, you will have access to a fairly narrow grammati-
cal environment. In free translation, in principle, you will have access to the
environment of the text or the text in this context of situation. That was the
notion of the environment, i.e. what you have access to to inform choices in
translation (see Figure 1).

Bo Wang: Among all the six dimensions you have mentioned in your paper,
can we measure equivalents and shifts along all these dimensions?

Christian Matthiessen: Yes, I agree. That was the notion. Instead of having a
kind of monolithic notion of shift or equivalence, you deconstruct it into the
different dimensions that the theory of language gives you, so that you can
reason about it in a more balanced way.
Figure 1: The environments of translation (adapted from Matthiessen, 2001: 77)
Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma     207
208     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

So, the cline of instantiation gives you a way of reasoning about. Is envi-
ronment just that of the particular register within which of the translated
text or sub-language (to use the term that machine translation people arrive
at)? Or you slide all the way up to the potential end of the cline of instantia-
tion, and talk about the overall meaning potential in culture, following the
way that folks are interested in the cultural environment of translation. It
is all there. You can be very explicit about how you decide where you locate
yourself.

5. Translation shifts from the metafunctional perspective

Bo Wang: In 2014, you published another book chapter, which is ‘Choice
in translation: Metafunctional considerations’ (Matthiessen, 2014), and this
paper discusses translation shifts from the perspective of metafunction. Why
do we need to study translation from the perspective of metafunction instead
of the other environments or dimensions?

Christian Matthiessen: I see that paper as a continuation of the concern

from the 2001 Environments (Matthiessen, 2001). Lots of the things that I
did in the context of exploring translations, preparing for teaching and so
on still have not been written up, such as thinking about translation and
examples, but I thought that one of the recurrent themes in translation is
what do translators attempt to, and what the translators do not attempt to.
You see again and again that from the translators’ point of view (even from
the professional translators’ point of view), the metafunctions are not cre-
ated equal, because the translators are not aware of the metafunctions. It is
a precedent of the operation, like studies by Mira Kim (e.g. Kim, 2007; Kim
and Huang, 2012), looking at what professional translators have done, going
between Korean and English. She looked at the translated text, and analysed
both the source text and the translated text from a textual point of view. She
found that there were shifts in the textual choices of Theme. The questions
are: were these shifts motivated or not, were they necessary. In one exper-
iment, she took the translated text, revised it, and thought about textual
issues. Then she presented the text to the readers, including her students who
did not know which was which. The interesting point is: it was the one that
she had revised based on her insight from the textual thematic analysis that
was preferred.
The point is that the professional translators had been so focused on the ide-
ational meaning primarily that they had overlooked the textual meaning. The
point of problematizing choices in the different metafunctions is precisely to
see how they worked together. Sometimes they may compete, because among
other things, translation is a process of optimizing. Sometimes maybe you
 Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma     209

have to give up on certain recreations of meaning in order to achieve others.

But what you want to ensure is that the choices are as informed as possible,
and the translator is actually aware of it. The choices do not just happen by
chance. If you have translators who do not actually know much theoretically
and professionally about language, chances are that it would not be some-
thing that they have thought about. (I have similar examples going between
English and Danish. I have looked at where the translation shifts seem com-
pletely uncalled for. You cannot find any motivated shift. It seemed that the
translator was just unaware of the shifts.)
Translation is probably one of the most challenging human tasks. It is a very
difficult operation. Translation, whether it is done in the community tradition-
ally by people who meet from different tribes to interpret and translate or done
by professional translators, is quite challenging in terms of what you have to be
able to do, and what you have to be able to control to be an effective translator.

Bo Wang: In Matthiessen (2014), there is a matrix of the metafunctional

translation shifts (see Figure 2). What do metafunctional translation shifts
mean? Why are some boxes left empty in the matrix?

Figure 2: Matrix of metafunctional translation shifts (adapted from Matthiessen, 2014:

284)

Christian Matthiessen: They are empty simply because of the way I displayed
the matrix. As we explore the shifts empirically by analysing texts, we allow
for all possible shifts. You can shift from textual to experiential, for example,
210     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

in looking at the matrix. So, some shifts are more likely and occur more often,
like shift between the textual and the logical, which tells us something about
those two metafunctional modes of meaning. Others are less likely, such as
shift from textual to experiential, but it does not mean that they would not
happen.
What I love to see is a long-term project of analysing lots of source and
target texts from different registers in these terms. When we progress in
this way, we will learn more about which boxes would ultimately remain
empty, and which ones would be more likely to be filled. For example, if
you translate advanced academic discourse from some languages to Eng-
lish, you might find more shifts towards the experiential because of the
prevalence of grammatical metaphor. This relates to Elke Teich’s (2003)
study of translation in the area of academic discourse between English and
German. She also focuses on nominalization as one aspect of grammatical
metaphor, what kinds of metaphor are possible in one language, and what
kinds are possible in another. Maybe there are areas where English has
gone further than German in metaphorizing patterns of meaning (possi-
bly not in all areas, but in certain ones). This is really an open and empiri-
cal question.

6. Directions for future research

Bo Wang: Let me borrow a title of your paper written by you and Mira Kim
for the final question – ‘Ways of moving forward’ (Kim and Matthiessen,
2015). In which directions do you think we shall move forward?

Christian Matthiessen: One direction is simply to conduct much more

empirical research that essentially involves text analysis not only in transla-
tion, but also in different kinds of interpreting across many different regis-
ters and across different kinds of translators (sometimes it is useful to have
translation as a cover term for translating and interpreting). There is a lot
that we need to find out, and to approach context of target text and source
text that are likely to encourage different kinds of translation. If you trans-
late in a written expounding context, such as a textbook in medicine, the pri-
mary focus is on ideational meanings, because you are constructing medical
knowledge, which will ultimately be an issue of life and death. In some sense,
accuracy and faithfulness are relative to the source text as a source of expert
knowledge. Contrast that with a context of recommending: promoting, such
as commercials and advertisements. You could not care less about the ide-
ational. What you want is interpersonal success. There are interesting studies
by Erich Steiner (e.g. 1997, 1998, 2004) on advertisements of Rolex watches.
You might make different translation choices depending on what has value in
 Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma     211

terms of tenor in the target culture, which may differ from the source culture.
What you really want is an advertisement that is an effective and persua-
sive piece of text. The ideational meaning does not matter unless it is about
some piece of machinery such as a computer equipment or fancy automo-
tive machinery that people are interested in how they work. To impress the
customers is part of the successful way of selling the product. What you are
really interested in is persuading people to buy something that they do not
necessarily need, parting with the money they do not necessarily have. So,
the considerations are very different. I would like to see this highlighted in a
much more general way. People have commented on the translation of adver-
tisements. The translator is considered also as a mediator, so that his role will
vary. I would love to see much more systematic study of this. Again it comes
down to really engaging with the key phenomena in translation, i.e. language.
I would also love to see continued works on the translation process or
the interpreting process, finding ways of accessing this that do not disturb
the process. For a while, think-aloud protocols were popular. They are inter-
esting, but the problem with think-aloud protocols is the observer’s para-
dox. They are actually disturbing the phenomenon they are trying to observe,
because if they ask a translator to think aloud as he/she is doing translation,
they are actually changing the phenomenon quite considerably. If there are
ways of observing the translation process without actually disturbing it, like
keylogging and eye tracking, this will be very interesting. Nowadays, one can
do this quite subtly. I’d love to see more about this kind of work. At some
point, we will be able to observe and scan the brain in the process of inter-
preting. That would be very interesting, and would feed into a thickened
description of translation. So, that is what I will think as one aspect, just in a
sense of scaling up the empirical efforts.
Some people are talking about the existence of translation universals
(e.g. Blum-Kulka, 1986; Baker, 1993; Mauranen and Kujamäki, 2004; Mau-
ranen, 2008; cf. House, 2008, 2018: Chapter 6). If you look at the history of the
engagement with language, you will find that people are always over-eager
to talk about universals. Think about the number of languages still remain-
ing with us. If it is over 60,000, if it is more than 4,000 as Bob Dixon (2010)
thinks (the number certainly runs into the thousands), then think about how
many of these have been studied in translation studies or in studies that are
concerned with translation. How many language pairs have been studied?
That would be an immediate invitation to humility about making any claims
about translation universals. Here I would recommend the work that I have
cited in different contexts by Andy Pawley (1987), which is very interesting.
He cites George Grace (e.g. 1981, 1981–1983) by saying that the languages that
are studied in translation are actually not that far apart. If we take English
212     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

and Chinese on a global scale, they are not that far apart. They both have
very long histories of written and standard languages, and are adapted to the
registers of the modern nation state. Then there are languages that operate
under very different cultural conditions. Pawley’s (1987) example is English
and Kalam. You could also take other languages where there will be a very
significant semiotic distance. We need these systematically being studied as
well.
If you want to pretend to talk about translation universals, then you need
that kind of empirical input. That is why we were very keen to promote the
notion of multilingual studies (Matthiessen, Teruya, and Wu, 2008). You
take different strands of engaging with multilingual phenomena that have
tended to be drifted apart, make sure that there is any connection with one
and another, so that investigations in translation inform work on language
comparison and typology (also the other way round). It is a total tragedy that
translation studies have been through the desire to institutionalize it as a
separate thing in itself, being insulated from language comparison and from
typology, whereas if you really take a step back and look at the overall scene,
these could inform one and another.
By the same token, insights in translation can be very helpful in think-
ing about second foreign language education when you push towards more
advanced mastery of a second foreign language. We all know that the tradi-
tional approach to second foreign language teaching has a syllabus based in
grammar and translation as a method, which was thrown out of the class-
room partly because it was copied from the attempt to work with reading
classical languages like ancient Greek and Latin. But if you think about what
would constitute a rich conception of a curriculum for inviting people to go
from into further advanced mastery, then that is an environment where it
makes a very good sense to bring translation back. Why? Coming back to
what I said that translation is probably one of the most challenging processes
that we can undertake linguistically, it seems very clear that if you move in
the direction of translation, you are really pushing the envelop of the target
language and the source language when you are translating from a second
language or foreign language into the mother tongue. Also, you will find
that it really pushes the translator, who is also the second foreign language
learner and mother tongue learner in learning the mother tongue. So, if you
are looking for new opportunities and challenges for truly advanced learn-
ers, you are trying to invite learners not to plateau, but to continue. Then
translation and interpreting are very interesting additional semiotic pro-
cesses taken on board.
I would also like to see more work taking insights from translation and
insights from editing the original, and much more work on editing from
 Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, and Yuanyi Ma     213

an informed linguistic point of view, to compare notes with what is going

on in translation, successive translation, and approximation of translations
(cf. Alves and Vale, 2011; Alves et al., 2016). There are many other aspects,
such as the theoretical developments that are needed. We can save that for
another time. On the whole, linguistics has been reasonably good at theo-
rizing the potential (not as much as a meaning potential, but as rule sys-
tems) and instances in text analysis. But a linguistic theory needs to engage
much more head-on with linguistic processes, and that is true of the pro-
cess of generation, the process of analysis and interpreting, and the pro-
cess of translation. So, from a theoretical point of view, I would love to see
this being developed theoretically. You could say it is a process of instantia-
tion, where you are going from potential to instance or the other way round
that you shunt up and down. That would be fascinating, important, and
necessary.

To be continued.

Note
* This transcript is based on the third of a series of the interviews conducted with Profes-
sor Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen on 20 October, 2016 in his office. The objective of this inter-
view is generally to contribute to the emerging literature of translation studies and Systemic
Functional Linguistics, by focusing on the questions we have prepared.

About the authors

Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen is Chair Professor of the Department of English,
the Faculty of Humanities, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he
is a member of the PolySystemic Research Group. He has degrees in linguistics
from Lund University (BA) where he also studied Arabic and philosophy, and
from University of California, Los Angeles (MA, PhD), and has previously held
positions at Sydney University and Macquarie University.

Bo Wang received his doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic Univer-
sity and is currently associate research fellow at School of International Studies,
Sun Yat-sen University. He is also an active member of the PolySystemic Research
Group. His research interests include Systemic Functional Linguistics, translation
studies, discourse analysis, and language typology.

Ma Yuanyi received her doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic Uni-
versity 2018 and is lecturer at Guangdong Polytechnic of Science and Technology.
She is a member of the PolySystemic Research Group, and her research interests
include Systemic Functional Linguistics, translation studies, discourse analysis,
and intercultural communication.
214     Interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

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