At 14:00 on November 1st, 2018, Prof. Annick Jaulin, once as the Head of Philosophy Department of the Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne, presented a lecture entitled "Writing Degree Zero and Language Structure: A Review on Roland Barthes’ thoughts" in the classroom 1408 on Xipu Campus of SWJTU. All the students of the Department of French attended the seminar. Besides, students interested in the semiotics, translatology, philosophy and other topics also went to the lecture.
At first, Ms. Tang Jialu, a young teacher from the Department of French of Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU) indicated that we, as translators, are supposed to keep concerned, modest and prudent all the time when facing excellent French writers. Meanwhile, Ms. Tang pointed out the primary problems and principal obstacles in our translation work. The methods to solve the problems, Ms. Tang proposed, are to hold the lecture firstly, and then, to offer the students philosophy courses provided by Sichuan University (SCU) to lay a solid foundation on social science.
Then, Ms. Zeng Yi, a lecturer from the Department of Philosophy of SCU, mentioned that SWJTU has already had a preliminary cooperation with SCU, which will be carried out from the practical level and the teaching level. With the hope to cope with the difficulties in translation together, Ms. Zeng expected the two universities to build cooperation like workshop. In addition, she said the SCU’s exchange projects related to France will give priority to the students of the Department of French in SWJTU.
The main part of the lecture is Prof. Annick Jaulin’s explanation of writing degree zero and language structure. To begin with, she talked about semiotics, the discipline itself, and then, came to language, style and wording. During the lecture, Prof. Annick Jaulin introduced the philosophical thoughts proposed by Hegel, Marx, Saussure and Barth, explaining them in details. She focused on the thoughts in language and structure of Saussure and Barth, giving a deep analysis on their backgrounds and the relationship between ideological resources, language structure and translation. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of structural points in Chinese-French translation.
In the end, Prof. Annick Jaulin answered the questions asked by students in depth. The students have learned a lot fromthe lecture.