Cross-cultural Texts Research Articles

Translating African Proper Names in Literary Texts

This paper analyses proper names in Yoruba culture and the translation of African names in three African literary texts, emphasizing the non-arbitrary nature of African names using a historical and textual approach. Ethical considerations for translating these texts into another language call for translation strategies that are likely to carry across the subversion of these cross-cultural texts. The paper concludes that the study of African proper names allows a foreign reader to have an insight into the African world-view and the socio-cultural values of African names.

Stoicism or Sufism? Hammer-Purgstall's Persian Meditations

The 1831 publication of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations in Persian comprises one of the 19th century's most intriguing cross-cultural and inter-religious texts. Produced by the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, and addressed to the reigning Shah of Persia, this translation negotiates a wide diversity of concerns, including political diplomacy, literary aesthetics and religious difference. The present study explores the complex process of rendering the philosophy of European antiquity for a modern Muslim readership, identifying the semantic shifts engendered by expressing pagan wisdom through a Persian idiom. Foremost in our consideration will be examining how Hammer-Purgstall's substitution of definitively Islamic language for Aurelius' Greek terminology produces a text that amalgamates Stoicism and Sufism, infusing Roman contemplation with Islamic spirituality. The paper concludes with discussion of Hammer-Purgstall's own investment in this translation's syncretism, reading these Persian Meditations as a reflection of his own spiritual life.

Obligation and reader involvement in English and Korean science popularizations: a corpus-based cross-cultural text analysis

Most research English/Korean cross-cultural text analysis has focused comparing discourse organization of academic texts written by English native speakers and ESL learners. However, this provides a limited view of textual differences between two cultures. In present research, we analyze a genre with a mass readership-newspaper science popularization texts-from an interpersonal perspective. Using two corpora of 356 British and Korean newspaper articles, we investigated modal expressions of obligation. Analytical categories were devised based two aspects: who is imposing obligation? (the obligation-imposer) and on whom obligation is imposed? (the obligation-imposed). The analysis shows differences in ways in which obligation is imposed reader in two corpora. The English writers depend more third-person scientific experts as the obligation-imposer, and tend to specify the explicitly. In contrast, Korean writers are more likely to impose obligation in their own persona, and to represent obligation-imposed implicitly. We explore in what ways these differences can be seen as reflecting cultural norms, focusing especially individualism and task-orientedness that are held to be characteristic of Western cultures as opposed to collectivism and relation-orientedness of Korean culture.

Personal pronouns in English and Korean texts: A corpus-based study in terms of textual interaction

This article presents a corpus based cross-cultural text analysis of the use of 2nd person and 1st person plural pronouns in English and Korean newspaper science popularizations. Approaching texts from the perspective of ‘Reader-Involvement Evoking acts’ – that is, the writer's textual attempt to evoke the reader's involvement in textual interaction – the research compares how the writers of the two cultures manipulate the two pronouns. The analysis reveals that there are quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of the two pronouns. I argue that these are due partly to syntactic dissimilarities between the two languages such as agent omission in Korean. In addition, the results seem to be affected by the socio-cultural context such as, on the one hand the preference for indirectness in text as a means of building a harmonious relation with the reader and the collectivistic tendency in the Korean society, and on the other the writer's attitude towards the reader and scientific phenomena in the British culture. Furthermore, the different degrees of contribution of science to the economy of each country seem in particular to be reflected in the different emphases on the referential scopes of the 1st person plurals in the two corpora.

The Roles of Questions in English and Korean Science Popularizations: A Corpus Based Cross-Cultural Text Analysis from the Perspective of Dialogic Interaction and the Reader's Involvement in Text

The Roles of Questions in English and Korean Science Popularizations: A Corpus Based Cross-Cultural Text Analysis from the Perspective of Dialogic Interaction and the Reader's Involvement in Text

An Empathic Response: Creating Pluralism through the Interpretation of Cross-cultural Texts

An Empathic Response: Creating Pluralism through the Interpretation of Cross-cultural Texts

Bicultural Perspectives and Reader Response: Four American Readers Respond to Jean Fritz's Homesick

The study of readers' responses to literature can help to make public the voices of bicultural children and young adults who experience life from a diversity of perspectives. This study explores the relationship between responses to literature and the complex world views of four bicultural students, three Asian American and one of Jewish and Eastern European descent. The focal literary work of the study was the cross-cultural text Homesick by Jean Fritz, a Newbery Honor book about the author's growing up in China on the eve of the Communist revolution. The participants were interviewed about their experiences with the text in terms of characterization, major events, setting, cultural and historical aspects of the narrative, and appropriateness of illustrations and photographs. Findings revealed a wide difference in responses among the girls. Knowledge of Chinese culture, stage of ethnic identity development, personality traits, and prior experiences with the genre of fictional autobiography were found to be major factors contributing to differences in responses.

BOOK REVIEW: ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier.BETWEEN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES: TRANSLATION AND CROSS-CULTURAL TEXTS. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

BOOK REVIEW: ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier.<b>BETWEEN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES: TRANSLATION AND CROSS-CULTURAL TEXTS</b>. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

Music of Missions: Themes of Cross-Cultural Outreach in the Psalms

Missiologists have talked about God's missionary heart as concerns Israel versus the missionary mandate given only to the church. This paper suggests how one can hermeneutically perceive “missionary” themes in the Old Testament; but mainly, working on this assumption, it presents explicit expressions of such cross-cultural outreach terminology and texts in the Book of Psalms—which may applicationally (if not interpretationally) be related to the motivations behind New Testament missions. Since the Psalter was the sacred songbook of Israel, to the extent it is applicable to international outreach with divine revelation, it is the music of missions.

Between languages and cultures: translation and cross-cultural texts

Translated texts are often either uncritically consumed by readers, teacher, and scholars or seen to represent an ineluctable loss, a diminishing of original texts. Translation, however, is a cultural practice, influenced also by social and political imperatives, which can open more doors than it closes. The essays in this book show how the act of translation, when vigilantly and critically attended to, becomes a means for active interrogation.

Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, ed. Between Languages and Cultures. Translation and Cross-cultural Texts. Pittsburgh and London, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, 359 p.

Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, ed. Between Languages and Cultures. Translation and Cross-cultural Texts. Pittsburgh and London, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, 359 p.. An article from journal TTR (Parcours de traduction), on Érudit.