On September 20, 2024, the proposal meeting for Social Trust Among the Chinese (English version), as one of Chinese academic translation projects of the National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC), was successfully held online. This project was jointly submitted by Associate Professor Tang Lei, Assistant Head from Department of Public Foreign Language Teaching at the School of Foreign Studies (SFS), Nankai University, and the Commercial Press, with Tang Lei serving as the project lead.
The proposal meeting was chaired by Professor Yan Guodong, Dean of the SFS at Nankai University. Attendees included Meng Delong, Assistant Minister of the Department for Humanities and Social Sciences Research Administration at Nankai University; Professor Zhai Xuewei, Vice President of the Chinese Association of Social Psychology and author of the original work, from the School of Social and behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University. They all delivered opening remarks.
The defense committee consisted of Professor Wen Xiuying, Executive Director of the Tianjin Association for International Cultural Studies and Dean of the School of Humanities at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics; Professor Zhang Kuo, a board member of the Chinese Association of Social Psychology from the School of Sociology at Nankai University; and Dr Jonathan Sieg (Chinese name: 许子恒), an American faculty member from the SFS at Nankai University. Professor Wen served as the convener for the defense session.
Project’s team members included Professor Wang Xinjian, former President of the Chinese Association of Social Psychology and an academic expert from Nankai University’s School of Sociology, Professor Lu Xiaokang, a project co-translator and Director of the Chinese Association of Social Psychology, and Armin Wisselink, a foreign academic expert from Nankai University’s Boling College, who serves as the foreign project’s editor.
In his opening remarks, Professor Yan introduced the attendees, extended a warm welcome to the experts, and expressed gratitude for the support received from all parties involved in the project application process. Meng emphasized the importance of the academic translation project, commended the project’s team composition, and expressed hopes that Professor Tang and the team would produce a high-quality translated work for an international readership. The original author, Professor Zhai, noted that Social Trust Among the Chinese aims to demonstrate the feasibility of localizing sociology from concept to theory to research. He also presented three key expectations for the translation project.
Professor Wen presided over the defense session, during which Project Director Tang provided an overview of the original text, explained the team’s division of responsibilities, discussed translation editing, outlined promotional efforts, and detailed the project timeline.
The defense committee members expressed strong support for the research plan, offering guidance on potential challenges in project execution. They recommended that the project team comprehensively ensure translation quality through aspects such as semantics, sentence structure, narrative organization, style, and logical coherence.
After a thorough review, the expert panel unanimously approved the project’s opening defense, recognizing the significant academic relevance of the project. They praised the team’s expertise in both academic and linguistic fields, commended the well-organized structure, and acknowledged the clear division of responsibilities within the team. Tang expressed gratitude to the experts and assured that the team would incorporate their valuable suggestions to further refine the project plan and ensure its successful completion.
