# 1
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to recommend to your distinguished program of postgraduate studies one of my best students, Miss AA.
Admittedly, "best" is a word whose value has undergone unbridled inflation in present-day appraisal of persons and things. But I make a point of employing this superlative modifier. Of all my students, a few have their translation of books, mostly British and American novels, published before their graduation, whereas Miss AA is the only one who has undertaken to grapple with such a non-fiction filled with shoptalk of the silk as one written by a most eminent judge in the UK. Although as reviser of her translation, which is to be published by the X Press, I have discovered some errors and mistakes in her work, yet for a senior undergraduate majoring not in law but in language and literature, the completion of rendering this noble book to Chinese and, in a more significant sense, for Chinese, a people notoriously bogged down in institutional chaos, is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement itself.
"Best" may be demonstrated on the academic dimension as well. While most graduating students in my Department of English choose to center their BA paper on easy or over-discussed topics like how to make advertisement slogans more impressive or whose translation of _The Story of the Stone_ is better, Yang Xianyi's or David Hawkes's, Miss AA, taking my suggestion, has begun to focus her attention as a novice of translation studies on an area that hitherto has not attracted adequate notice of China's academia: the role played by biblical translation in the Taiping Rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty or, as I view it, the relationship between a mistranslation and a misrevolution. The moment she presented to me a detailed proposal, laid upon one page of bibliography, for her research project, I was convinced that she owns the potential of a scholar.
Furthermore, I believe that she will prove particularly good at doing translatology due to her amazing flair for language. A native of Chongqing, P. R. China's youngest municipality, which was part of Sichuan and is famous for a dialect that sounds drastically different both from those in southern provinces and from official mandarin, she speaks fluent Cantonese simply because of her long-time viewing of TVB sit-coms. Her proficiency in written English is also outstanding, as her scores in the course, Intensive Reading, were the highest in her class, for which I served as the instructor. Now I am pleased to learn that she has been interested in classical Chinese literature for long, which will certainly enrich her odyssey into the art and craft of translation, a sun-rise intellectual enterprise that, to my understanding, needs to blaze other trails than metaphysical speculation or case studies of text and technique.
To sum up, it is my firm belief that Miss AA will be among the youthful strengths for translation studies, provided she be given enough exposure to and communication with greater teachers and more resources. Therefore, I will highly appreciate your consideration in favor of her enrollment. Should there be any further inquiry regarding her application, please feel free to contact
Yours most faithfully,
Dr Boarhead
#2
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to recommend to your distinguished postgraduate program Miss BB, who is one of the best students that I have ever taught at my University.
Linguistically, Miss BB is a talent among students of her generation. A graduate of the locally renowned X Foreign Language School, she is not only fluent in English but also good at Spanish. When studying courses in my charge, she distinguished herself by keeping her scores among the top three. Her vocabulary of English is sometimes even larger than that of some of her teachers. To me, it is no wonder at all that her GPA gets above 3.8. In her extracurricular hours, she has made full use of her philological strengths by working part time for such significant cultural events as the Shanghai International Film Festival, the 2010 World Expo Shanghai, and exhibitions hosted by the Shanghai Art Museum and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. Indeed, the feedback from the art museum is that although a mere sophomore, she was well able to handle various translation projects, written as well as spoken. Such experiences have substantially enriched her exploration of language so much so that academically ambitious now, she is determined to perform postgraduate studies in related provinces of learning overseas.
Yet she has been fully aware that scholarship was not all about talent. Three years ago, she began to help me work on the _Oxford X Dictionary_ (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010). She spent months translating and revising entries and realized the importance of industriousness and of attention to both system and detail in the training of a scholar. Her contribution is formally acknowledged in the dictionary, an honor almost unimaginable for a college student in mainland China. She, however, did not stop at practice but attempted to delve into theory. With one of her fellow students, she succeeded in securing funding from my University's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for their project "On the Imbalance of Encoding and Decoding of the Second Edition of the X Dictionary," which hopefully is well on its way to completion. Meanwhile, alongside her engagement in lexicography, she went on to translate, all on her own, a novel, _X_ by X. Her Chinese translation, consisting of about 200 thousand characters, will soon be published by the prestigious, X-based X Press. If my memory serves me aright, no other undergraduate student in my Department of English has ever made so many considerable academic achievements.
I am among those who strongly advise Miss BB to study abroad. To be sure, she was in the UC Education Abroad Program at University of California, Berkeley for a year. But that is far from enough to tap her potentialities, to make her great. She needs exposure to more quality intellectual resources, which, I believe, are easily available at your institution. I will highly appreciate your consideration in favor of her application. Should you have any inquiry concerning her case, please feel free to contact
Yours most faithfully,
Dr Boarhead
# 3
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to recommend to your distinguished program of postgraduate studies one of my best and most special students, Miss CC.
Words like "best" are clichés in letters of recommendations. So let me elaborate on "most special." I made the acquaintance of Miss CC in the autumn of 2008, when I began to teach at Fudan University. She was enrolled in my course, Extensive Reading, and stood out as a participant whose proactive performance in class caught my attention at once. From her spontaneous answers and discussions, which covered a wide compass of topics related to the humanities and social sciences, neo-Confucianism and the Third Indochine War, to name a few, I saw vaguely yet hopefully in her not only the makings of an expert on language and literature but also the growth and strength of a beautiful thinker, one perhaps like Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag. At the peril of sounding like a male chauvinist pig, I must admit that such a young person is a rarity in my Department of English, which, paradoxically, is proverbial for the predominance of girls in its student population. On the other hand, finding that her proficiency in English was not sufficient enough to sustain her further pursuit of Western scholarship, I kept asking her to work harder on language training and, with a view to accelerating her progress in this aspect, offered her some part-time editorial and translation jobs at, for example, the Shanghai office of X University Press. Meanwhile, we often lunched and dined in our University's canteens, exchanging view points, sometimes like "cannons overcharged with double cracks," on current events as well as of issues of interest in academia. Thus, we became close friends after class -- it does not follow, however, that I am impartial in her recommendation.
As a junior undergraduate, she went to the United States for a year studying at University of California, San Diego. This year, in my eyes, shocked and shaped her soul. Although I know not what courses she took and what knowledge she acquired on the other side of the Pacific, I was able to perceive upon her arrival home her re-fuelled love for learning, freedom, and truth, the universally celebrated values of the human race. The sophistication of her way of thinking as a youthful strength of the intelligentsia is demonstrated in her BA thesis on the unfair treaties signed by the Qing government with foreign powers, a study of the influence of language communication on the clashes of civilizations, a study radically different, with its remarkable clarity and profundity in literature review, development of argumentation, and presentation of facts and figures, from those of her peers, which usually deal with far easier topics like translation strategies for advertisement slogans. What's more, her fluent American accent amazed me very much, itself a testimony to the fact that she is a smart learner. Then I suggested to her that she go abroad to realize her distant dream of Liberalism, since mainland China seems unlikely to provide the milieu that would nourish it and see it flourish.
After a recent luxury liner tour around Asia Pacific in her fulfilling gap year, Miss CC has decided to apply for admission to your prestigious postgraduate program. I will highly appreciate your consideration in the favor of this precious pal and pupil of mine. Should you need to conduct any extra inquiry regarding her case, please feel free to contact
Yours most faithfully,
Dr Boarhead
RSS Feed