Materiality, New Economics and Dynamics in Controlled Cultural Writing: A Derridean Exploration

Abstract

Advanced information technologies have triggered a return to materialism with a focus on rapid re/production of cultural resources in multimedia applications. Machine-enabled translation has emerged as one possible solution to achieving the goal of massive re/production and transmission of cultural materials in diverse languages for international cross-cultural communication on the web. In light of the need of improving machine translation (MT) performance, controlled cultural writing (CCW) is here proposed as an alternative to general language writing. CCW refigures the format and re-presents the utterances of cultural texts emphasizing material presence of factual information for easy machine rendition. In addition to its materialistic feature, CCW undergoes a dramatic modification through paraphrase so that its meaning or thematic message is far from matching the original one. This dynamic feature is justified by the Derridean concepts of dissemination and difference. One more feature of CCW is its function of new economics resulting from its economical way of reproducing cultural information through multilingual MT application. Drawing on the controlled writings of Chinese folk texts as a case study, this paper explores the three attributes of CCW by using Derridean deconstruction concepts as the theoretical framework.