Cross-cultural Mediation Research Articles

Cross-Cultural Mediators in Resolving Conflicts in Indonesia

This article focuses on the role of cross-cultural mediators in resolving conflicts related to cultural violence in Indonesia and provides an overview of the cultural context in Indonesia and the factors that contribute to the prevalence of cultural violence. The article then discusses the role of cross-cultural mediators in facilitating dialogue and promoting understanding between different cultural groups. Using a qualitative research methodology, the article explores the experiences of cross-cultural mediators working in different parts of Indonesia. Diverse references like literature, academic papers, scientific publications, dissertations, and similar materials concerning delicate cultural aspects, categorization of aggression within Indonesian society, and elements impacting the development of a violent culture are mentioned within the paper. The article highlights the challenges and opportunities that mediators face in their work, including the need to build trust and develop effective communication strategies. The article argues that cross-cultural mediation can be an effective tool for resolving conflicts related to cultural violence in Indonesia. The article emphasizes the importance of developing culturally sensitive and context-specific mediation strategies that take into account the unique cultural and historical factors that contribute to violence in different regions of the country. In conclusion, the article highlights the need for greater support for cross-cultural mediators in Indonesia, including training and capacity-building programs, as well as increased awareness and recognition of the important role that mediators play in promoting peace and resolving conflicts related to cultural violence. The article argues that cross-cultural mediation has the potential to contribute to building a more peaceful and just society. Keywords: cross culture, mediation, conflict, resolution

The Role Of A Translator As A Cross-cultural Mediator

The Role Of A Translator As A Cross-cultural Mediator

A cross-cultural look at the role of rumination in the relationship between trait anxiety and romantic breakup distress

Romantic breakups are considered ”normative” events because of their high prevalence, but they can also be stressful, and even traumatic experiences. Although there is an increasing interest in studying romantic breakups, there are few studies proposing mechanisms that turn a romantic breakup into a health problem. Based upon existing literature, we chose rumination as a mediator between trait anxiety and breakup distress. In addition, given that culture plays a significant role in both grief response and the process of rumination, we expected rumination plays a differential role in mediating the relationship between trait anxiety and breakup distress across Argentinian and North American samples, although we did not specify a moderation hypothesis due to absence of previous antecedents in the literature. To set a firm measurement foundation, we initially evaluated measurement invariance prior to testing substantive models. 415 Argentinians (78% female) and 383 USA (66% female) students who experienced a romantic breakup were recruited. Several measurement adjustments were needed to support metric invariance for the items. The indirect effect involving brooding rumination between the trait anxiety and breakup distress was significant in both countries, and not significantly different between the countries. Rumination thinking was shown as a full cross-cultural mediator of the relationship between trait anxiety and breakup distress in both countries. Our results could point at a starting point to think of rumination as a cross-culturally invariant mechanism explaining why insecure individuals (i.e., high trait anxiety) tend to suffer more during a breakup compared to less anxious individuals.

Authorial (audio) description

Abstract The unprecedented growth of audiovisual translation practices in the creative industries has boosted the role of creativity which has taken centre stage and become the emblem of global cultural policies. The study addresses the role of creativity in the digital space of Netflix as a means of cross-cultural mediation and communication, and as a multidimensional tool in audio description (AD), in order to provide the end-users (the blind and visually impaired audiences) of digital audiovisual products with participatory and engaging forms of access to the audiovisual ‘planet’. The aim is to investigate whether and how creativity is used to transmit culture-specific references (CSRs) from a translation perspective within a highly discussed TV series streamed on Netflix. To do so, the rendering of the most significant CSRs in the Korean Netflix series Squid Game (SG) as transferred into the English and Italian ADs will be examined.

Cross-Cultural Mediation: Practice Issues for Lawyers

Cross-Cultural Mediation: Practice Issues for Lawyers

Forgiveness, rumination, and depression in the United States and Korea: A cross-cultural mediation study.

Although substantial research has separately investigated forgiveness, rumination, and depression in the United States, few studies have investigated all three constructs in the same sample and we know of no studies that have examined how forgiveness, rumination, and depression are interrelated across cultures. To address this issue, we conducted a cross-cultural study wherein 204 and 297 healthy young adults from Korea and the United States, respectively, completed the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, Ruminative Response Scale, and Beck Depression Inventory-II. Compared to USparticipants, Korean participants exhibited more forgiveness, similar levels of rumination, and slightly more depression. Two-group structural equation models revealed that forgiveness was directly related to depressive symptoms, and that forgiveness was indirectly related to depressive symptoms through rumination, in both the United States (proportion mediated = 0.363) and Korea (proportion mediated = 0.394). This indirect association did not differ across cultures. Considered together, these results suggest that forgiveness appears to have beneficial effects on depression that are mediated through forgiveness-related reductions in rumination, and, importantly, that these effects are similar across cultures.

Fixed Intelligence Mindset, Self-Esteem, and Failure-Related Negative Emotions: A Cross-Cultural Mediation Model.

A growing body of literature supports that fixed intelligence mindset promotes the emergence of maladaptive emotional reactions, especially when self-threat is imminent. Previous studies have confirmed that in adverse academic situations, students endorsing fixed intelligence mindset experience higher levels of negative emotions, although little is known about the mechanisms through which fixed intelligence mindset exerts its influence. Thus, the present study (Ntotal = 398) proposed to investigate self-esteem as a mediator of this relationship in two different cultural contexts, in Hungary and the United States. Structural equation modeling revealed that self-esteem fully mediated the relationship between fixed intelligence mindset and negative emotions. Furthermore, results of the invariance testing conferred preliminary evidence for the cross-cultural validity of the mediation model. These findings suggest that, students adhering to fixed intelligence beliefs tend to experience greater self-esteem loss when experiencing academic failure, which leads to higher levels of negative emotions.

Social and Psychological Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on Adolescents' and Young Adults' Mental Health: A Cross-Cultural Mediation Study.

The ongoing pandemic has dramatically disrupted daily life, increasing the risk of developing psychiatric disorders and poor mental wellbeing. The compound effects of social, political and psychological stressors have increased psychological symptoms among adolescents and young people, with worries about COVID-19 playing a central role in the clinical course of their mental health problems caused by the pandemic. The aim of this cross-cultural study was to examine the social psychological effects of COVID-19 on adolescents’ and young people’s mental health and wellbeing in Ibero-American population. Participants involved 6,283 adolescents and young adults from five different Spanish-Speaking countries (83.7% female) aged between 12 and 30 years (M = 18.79; SD = 3.48). Participants completed the Worries about COVID-19 and its Consequences Scale (W-COV), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21). Descriptive analyses, multivariate ANOVAs and Pearson correlations were performed, as well as Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) testing a mediational model. The results indicate cross-cultural difference in COVID-19 related worries, emotional symptoms and life satisfaction. Results from SEM confirmed the overall indirect effects of COVID-19 cases, political response and participants’ conditions during lockdown on depression, anxiety, stress and life satisfaction mediated by COVID-19 related worries. These findings suggest that the social psychological factors underlying psychological symptoms could be partly explained by increased worries about COVID-19 and its personal, social, economic and political consequences, which may offer guidance to policy makers and health services for safeguarding youth mental well-being.

Relationship between self-care activities, stress and well-being during COVID-19 lockdown: a cross-cultural mediation model

ObjectivesTo examine the mediation role of self-care between stress and psychological well-being in the general population of four countries and to assess the impact of sociodemographic variables on this relationship.DesignCross-sectional,...

Cross-cultural Language Learning: Interpretative Engagement

Conceptualization of foreign language teaching as a cross-cultural interaction means engaging learners in various cultural mediations. Language use becomes a form of interpretative architecture of a target language. Understanding language use from a discursive perspective develops meta-pragmatic awareness and interpretative capacities of learners. The study answers the question of how to design the architecture of context analysis. This research aims to determine the effective ways of interpretative engagement of learners with aspects of pragmatics in the Ukrainian university setting. The study investigates how the process of interaction shapes the engagement of learners in practices of noticing, reflection, and comparison of cross-cultural situations. The data came from a case study on cross-cultural language learning within the second semester, 2021. The study analyzes the audio-recording of the classes, researcher notes, and post-course interviews of 24 participants. This research used a method of the content analysis. The study of the results, based on six categories (narrative analysis, discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative analyses, conversation analysis, and critical analysis), showed that the learners started to consider the nature of their cross-cultural mediation. The research proved that through such an interpretative engagement, students become engaged into working with languages and cultures. The study presents some recommendations for language teachers to create a meaning-making process from multiple perspectives.

PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF ROLE TAKING IN CROSS-CULTURAL MEDIATION IN TRANSLATION

In the context of cross-cultural mediation in translation the problem of switching between different conceptual and linguistic worldviews is of particular interest. The present paper suggests that this switching should be seen as switching between different linguacultural roles, i.e. the roles of members of the source and target cultures. The aim of this article is to identify and describe the psychological resources, processes and mechanisms involved in taking the role of a member of a different culture. Based on the analysis of relevant literature the following psychological resources required for taking a different linguacultural role have been identified: a) empathy; b) agency; c) creativity; d) reflection; e) willingness to invest in taking a new role. The practical value of the present paper is determined by the fact that a better understanding of the above-mentioned psychological resources, processes and mechanisms can enable improvements in teaching translation and foreign languages to trainee translators by making students’ learning activity more conscious, purposeful and professionally-oriented. Practical recommendations for implementing the proposed ideas are provided.

Did You Try Our Good Smoked Ham? Assessing the Quality of Translation as Cross-Cultural Mediation on Croatian Tourist Board Websites

Tourist discourse has been recognized as a specialized type of cross-cultural communication. Thus, successful translation of tourist texts assumes that translators act as cross-cultural mediators on a number of levels. The rather low quality of translation in the tourism sector has been pointed out by several Translation Studies scholars. However, not much systematic empirical research on the quality of translation in this sector has been carried out. This paper analyses a corpus of multilingual websites produced by Croatian tourist boards. In the analysis of the data I rely on the criteria for assessing translation quality of web translation developed by Pierini (2007), and place a special focus on the achievement of pragmatic level equivalence between source and target texts as a major criterion of successful cross-cultural communication in the translation of tourism discourse.

A survey of Korean elementary schoolteachers on their communication with students and parents from migrant backgrounds and the need for quality language services

This paper investigates communication problems facing teachers when they interact with students and parents from migrant backgrounds, and explores the need for quality language services in educational settings. According to a questionnaire-based survey of 142 elementary schoolteachers, about 20–25 per cent of respondents frequently experienced difficulties in communicating with students and parents who lacked Korean language proficiency. However, the teachers usually managed without outside assistance largely because of the lack of language support services. Effective communication is needed through the delivery of more language services to support children’s learning, school education and parents’ meaningful participation in both. Most teachers surveyed supported more effective language services in their schools, but were not very vocal in advocating for professional interpreting services. Instead, they tended to emphasise other forms of language and cultural training for multicultural students and their parents. This response may derive from their lack of experience with professional interpreting services, and a lack of awareness of the limited resources available for quality service provision or the influence of assimilation policies. The findings also indicate that teachers do not consider the interpreting and translation skills of language service providers as highly as cross-cultural mediation skills, understanding of the education system or interest in individual students’ needs. The results call for further research into what would constitute best practice in educational interpreting to effectively mediate cultural differences between schools and multicultural families, and address the needs and concerns of teachers, students and parents from multicultural backgrounds.

Belief in a corrupt world: A cross-cultural mediation model of beliefs about justice, punishment, and corruption

Psychological research on the relationship between corruption and belief in a just world (BJW) is lacking and often reports conflicting results. The present study sought to advance this line of research by examining the mediating role of perceptions of punishment in the relationship between corruption and BJW across countries with different corruption levels (i.e., Brazil, United States, and The Netherlands). Six hundred and fifty-four participants completed measures of global BJW, personal BJW, perceived punishment, and perceived corruption. The results showed no evidence for a direct relationship between global BJW and corruption. Personal BJW was directly related to corruption, but only in the Brazilian sample. Additionally, it was found that perceived punishment mediated the relationship of both BJW dimensions with perceived corruption. Overall, these findings indicate that perceived punishment is an important mediator of the relationship between BJW and perceived corruption. Importantly, this study highlights that the macro-level context is an important factor in the mediation. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed in relation to dispositional predictors of corruption.

Ocean's Eleven stand-alone Scene 12 with subtitles – a gift for teaching, what lessons for research?

ABSTRACT This article considers Scene 12 from Soderbergh's 2001 Ocean's Eleven from two angles: as a productive scene for teaching fundamentals of audiovisual translation (AVT), and as a cautionary tale for research. Scene 12 is unusual and unrepresentative in its all-in-one illustrative richness, and a comprehensive microcosm that makes it an excellent tool for teaching, and drawing attention to basic and more complex aspects and features of cultural and linguistic transfer in a multimodal context. By the same token, it is an invitation to (re-)appraise on the larger scale of full cinematic contexts the complexity of AVT as cross-cultural mediation and its implications for research. The article is one of several focusing on Ocean's Eleven Scene 12 for the Special Issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice on AVT and Interdisciplinarity of which it is a part. The shared dataset for the scene and rationale for its choice are found in the Introduction to the volume.

Kulturvermittlung Zwischen (Sowjet-)Russland und der Schweiz: Der Nachlass des Musikwissenschaftlers Robert-Aloys Mooser (1876–1969) in den Bibliotheken Genf und Basel

The Swiss musicologist Robert-Aloys Mooser (1876–1969) was one of the most accomplished connoisseurs of Russian/Soviet musical life. He published numerous works on Russian and Soviet music history, which are still among the standard works. Based on his legacy and his correspondence, which are housed in the libraries of Geneva and Basel, this article illuminates Mooser's function as cross-cultural mediator between West and East before and during World War II.

Comparing insults across languages in films: Dubbing as cross-cultural mediation

Abstract Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to investigate the codification of impoliteness within and across linguacultures. In this contribution, we hypothesise that cross-cultural mediation in dubbing arises from hybridisation, a product of the contact between source and target language. Drawing on a parallel and comparable corpus of original and dubbed films, the study focuses on two major categories of insults and explores contrastively their overall frequency, the distinction between genuine and mock impoliteness and the structural complexity of forms. A degree of comparability is observed across Anglophone, Italian and dubbed Italian films, although distinctive trends also emerge from the corpus analysis. If Italian films globally make more frequent use of insults, Anglophone films stand out for their greater reliance on mock impoliteness and greater elaboration of forms. Dubbed films tend to position midway, reproducing source language patterns, while also partaking distinguishing lexico-grammatical traits of the target language. The results substantiate the function dubbing serves in cross-cultural mediation by activating an array of frames of reference that allow the new receiving audiences to experience foreign communication practices from their native language perspective.

Subtitling’s cross-cultural expressivity put to the test: A cross-sectional study of linguistic and cultural representation across Romance and Germanic languages

Abstract This article focuses on linguistic and cultural representation in AVT as a medium of intercultural literacy. It has two objectives: it puts to the test increasingly accepted assumptions about AVT modalities’ distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity, with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in subtitles across Romance and Germanic languages. The second objective is to make a start on a neglected question to date, by considering, concurrently, the respective potential for representation of different types of languages, Indo-European in the first instance, in different pair configurations. The study applies to (Romance) French, Italian, Spanish and (Germanic) English and German and uses a cross-cultural pragmatics framework to explore representation, per se and comparatively across the languages represented in the main data, Lonnergan’s 2016 feature film Manchester by the Sea. Data is approached qualitatively from a target text end in the first instance and primarily, in a subset of scenes from across the film. Quantitative analysis is used complementarily for diagnostic purposes or as a complementary source of evidence, with initial focus on types of features identified in earlier studies as a locus of stylised representation in subtitling with evidence of distinctive pragmatic indexing (e.g. pronominal address, greetings, thanking). The study is a pilot study and is exploratory at this stage, but part of a broader endeavour to inform debates about, and build up the picture of, AVT as cross-cultural mediation and, ultimately, promote our understanding of films in translation’s societal impact.

Cross-cultural Mediation in ELF Migration Contexts: Pedagogical Implications on ELT Multilingual Settings

ELF cross-cultural interactions and mediation processes in specialized migration settings are often characterized by ‘gatekeeping’ asymmetries between the participants involved challenging a successful meaning negotiation (Guido, 2008). The exploration of migration encounters (Sperti, 2017) is particularly useful in the analysis of naturally occurring dialogues among ELF users, since it shows how ELF speakers, engaged in intercultural interactions, appropriate the English language according to their own native linguacultural and paralinguistic schemata, and to specific pragmalinguistic purposes and processes. The multimodal investigation of the occurring hybridization processes is focused on (i) ELF redefinition of existing native paralinguistic correlates in the pragmalinguistic use of an ELF variation; and (ii) resulting L1 transfers affecting the performing of speech acts and the conversational composition and progress. The analysis reveals (a) the mediation of meaning, experience and intentionality in terms of resulting lexical, syntactical, and register performance; and (b) the role played by prosody and paralanguage in the mutual acceptance of speakers’ intentions, attitudes, and cognitive schemata, in spoken specialized discourse related to medical and legal integration, mediated migration narratives, cross-cultural conceptual representations and reception of traumatic experience. The heuristic approach applied to the analysis of data derived from the exploration of real plurilingual cross-cultural exchanges is particularly useful in the promotion of the conscious use of cross-cutting strategies as powerful learning tools embedded in the language learning process, with the ultimate aim of (i) investigating the possible impact of migration on teacher education, (ii) defining an ELF-aware pedagogical framework in plurilingual educational settings, and (iii) enhancing the development of learners’ skills in intercultural communication.

“We have stories to share!”: Narratives of Identity and Perspectives of Japanese Descent Teachers in the USA

As the number of immigrant children entering school systems increases across the globe, preparing teachers to support these children and their families is of critical importance. How to support and bring strength to English language learners (ELLs) and immigrant children is a new subject among the scholarship of teacher education, due to the increasing numbers of immigrant children. There are unique complexities that educators need to consider, including: (a) their own cross/bicultural, bilingual identity development, (b) their interpersonal relationship building, and (c) their hybrid experiences in a culturally and linguistically unfamiliar environment with other children and teachers in a new country.In this study, we focus mainly on three teachers who are Japanese descent and their support of Japanese immigrant students. Findings from this study suggest that the three teachers used their funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) as immigrants and immigrant teachers to support their Japanese immigrant students in the following three categories: building interpersonal connections, cross-cultural mediation, and nurturing identity development in the context of hybridity and wholeness.