A Study Of Governmental Foreign Language Service Responding To "The Belt And Road Initiative" From The Perspective Of Foreign Language Planning

The Belt and Road Initiative is a great career,which promotes mutual development and benefit of people of all nations within the geographic sphere involved in the Belt and Road Initiative.However,without language support,including foreign language service,this great career may not be implemented successfully.At present,the most predominant research on foreign language service in China is mainly about English language service.Research on foreign language service of other languages is comparatively scarce in quantity and inferior in quality.Meanwhile,the foreign language service providers who have been researched on,are generally limited to enterprises and individuals,with little attention being paid to governments.Therefore,this thesis,with an intention of promoting the Belt and Road Initiative,took the foreign language service provided by governments of Jiangsu,Shaanxi,Yunnan,Heilongjiang,Shanxi and Hubei Provinces from September,2013 to July,2017 as the object of study.The database of the current situations of governmental foreign language service of six provinces was built by means of documentary study and corpus research in order to figure out the foreign language service situations of six provinces.Interviews with two experts on the Belt and Road Initiative and six foreign language teachers from each province were conducted.And foreign language planning suggestions on providing better foreign language service,in terms of four dimensions,which are status planning,languages planning,functional planning and acquisition planning were then put forward based on the database research results and the interviews.The results show that: 1)Despite the increasing trend of statistics of foreign language service on the 18 platforms from 2013 to 2017,merely six websites had corresponding pages of foreign languages versions,and most of which were in English,which implies that governments should pay more attention to the status of foreign language and foreign language service and make efforts to address the problem of imbalanced foreign languages structures.2)With respect to the specific contents of governmental foreign language service of six provinces,the ratio of economic service was rather higher than those of cultural service and political service while the proportions of foreign language cultural integration service and foreign language products service were conspicuously larger than those of foreign language talents service,foreign language application service and foreign language academic service.The imbalanced structure of contents of foreign language service indicates that governments should improve the structure of foreign language service in that people's demands for foreign language service are rather more diversified now.3)Apart from these similarities,the amounts of the news data of governmental foreign language service of six provinces were quite different.On the whole,the ratio of the news data of Yunnan Province was higher than those of other five provinces,followed by Heilongjiang Province,Shaanxi Province,Jiangsu Province and Hubei Province,finally Shanxi Province.The causes behind the different situations of governmental foreign language service of six provinces reveal that as a main provider of foreign language service,governments of all provinces possess the responsibility to make proper foreign language planning so as to provide diverse and high-quality foreign language service to the community.By extension,in order to provide better service,all provinces are not merely required to cultivate more high-level foreign language professionals,but also need to promote the transition of the foreign language disciplines.This thesis,by comparing and contrasting the foreign language service provided by six governments in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative and giving advice on offering foreign language service from the perspective of foreign language planning,would not solely make its contribution to the research fields of the Belt and Road Initiative,foreign language planning and foreign language service,but also assist provinces involved in the Belt and Road Initiative to give introspection on and improve the foreign language service offered by themselves.