Foreign Recipients Research Articles

NGO Support for International Security Force Vetting and Screening

Abstract Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL) for the purpose of contributing to criminal accountability processes. This requires NGOs to meet criminal procedural standards, often dedicating extensive resources to a form of accountability that is difficult to secure. Given these challenges, this article explores an alternative end-use for NGO documentation of violations: the security force vetting carried out by multilateral organizations and donor governments as part of an international exchange of resources or personnel. In particular, we examine the United Nations system for screening peacekeepers, and national and international systems for vetting foreign recipients of security force assistance. We review the processes and rationale for these international vetting and screening systems, identifying both opportunities and challenges for NGO engagement. We conclude that NGOs seeking to restrict the power and capacity of an abusive security force may find it worthwhile to engage with these systems, which would benefit from the contribution of high-quality NGO documentation.

Некоторые проблемы перевода политического анекдота (на материале немецкого языка)

The aim of the research is to identify potential problems in translating political German jokes into Russian. The research is based on jokes about the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany extracted from a printed collection and relevant German thematic Internet sites. The scientific novelty of the research lies in substantiating a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the problems of translation (understanding) of a political joke, in which attention should be focused not only on interlingual, but also on intercultural differences between the two societies. The research conducted allows us to confirm that the structure of a (political) joke in German and Russian societies is similar. Translation problems usually arise due to insufficient linguistic competence, as well as to the lack of cultural background in conveying historical, political, cultural realia, which contain implicit cultural subcontext. To understand the latter, one should possess cultural knowledge close to that of a native speaker. So, to perceive a comic effect of a joke, a foreign recipient should first study culturally relevant information or it should be explained to them.

Cultural Lacunae: Lacunas of Activity as Intercultural Communication in Translation

The article deals with the translation issues of lacunas of activity as cultural lacunae which are an integral part of the Kyrgyz culture and adequate interpretation of which plays a great role in intercultural communication. Through translated works of art cultures undoubtedly communicate in many ways. Traditions, rituals and other behavioral peculiarities characteristic to one culture might be quite unknown or even seem strange to foreign readers. The author tried to give examples for lacunas of activity described in the novels by Ch. Aitmatov and to show the difficulties of lacunas of activity translation as none of the methods proposed by scholars can be used in transforming them into English. Comparing lacunas of activity in the ST and TT, it has been found out that gestures, movements, actions that follow talking reflected in the works of art can’t be eliminated, compensated or commented in literary translation therefore it will be challenging for foreign recipients. Indifferent readers will find them strange while concerned ones will get more information about another culture. This way cultures communicate with each-other through translation.

From the experience of using media texts in RFL classes in a group of 4th-year philology students of Shenzhen MSU-BIT University

Recently, the concept of a language environment has acquired particular importance in the methodology and practice of teaching RFL, the key component of which is a textbook accompanied by culturological materials, including media texts, understood as "dynamic complex units of the highest level through which speech communication is carried out in the field of mass communications" (N. A. Kuzmina). Being the main unit of the media stream division, it unites various types of media products. Taking into account the current stage of technology development, the use of media texts at the B2-C1 language proficiency levels, characterized by broad communicative competence, understanding of the nuances of intercultural communication, seems appropriate and desirable. Although some authentic Internet texts require the formation of communicative competence in foreign recipient students close to the capabilities of native speakers, they are necessary for solving certain methodological tasks. In this regard, the work with an authentic post on the topic of intelligence from the site "Pikabu" in a group of 4th-year philology students of the Shenzhen MSU-BIT University preceded the discussion of the topic based on the material of reviews of the book by D. S. Likhachev "Letters about good and beautiful". The chosen media text allowed students to analyze, interpret the statement, and evaluate it. The discussion of the semantic side of the text activated their critical thinking, the development of communicative abilities. The discussion of the language side made it possible to attract the attention of students to its stylistic and genre features. The motivation of students while discussing the topic on the material of the post increased, so the subsequent study of the text of Likhachev's letter took place in an atmosphere of interest. Thus, the work with authentic material that is minimal in volume, but as representative as possible for the modern Russian media space, has proved its motivating and cognitive value. The use of media products of the considered type in Russian language classes at an advanced stage is a way to increase the motivation of students while discussing complex socio-cultural and linguistic problems.

The Distribution Of United States Foreign Aid

Over the last few decades, the United States has largely provided foreign aid based on political interests instead of humanitarian needs. Conditions for providing aid include enforcing foreign recipients to use the aid on American products and prioritizing aid to countries with a larger presence in popular media platforms. Thus, foreign assistance is not being directed to countries that need it the most, which can significantly affect political instability in the foreign country as well as exacerbate any existing refugee crisis. On a more macro-scale, the United States’ failure to provide aid to the neediest also ultimately harms its sphere of influence, especially when undemocratic foreign countries end up addressing the humanitarian gap that the United States could have fulfilled. This paper aims to elucidate the global scale of this problem and propose some strategies to address this issue from a financial and political point of view.

Экономико-аналитический подход к оценке налоговых рисков отсутствия фактического права на доход

The subject of the study is the identification by the tax authorities of the dependence of the jurisdiction of the location of the parent companies of Russian organizations on the amount of additional charges for corporate income tax withheld at source in Russia, while controlling the actual right to income (FPA) of a foreign organization. The purpose of the work is to develop proposals for tax risk management in determining the FPA. The article, in conjunction with the analysis of the dynamics of foreign direct investment from Russia, analyzes information on changes in the amounts of corporate income tax paid when paying passive income to foreign recipients, as well as data on the amount of additional tax when monitoring the status of the FPA. As a result of the analysis of court decisions on the basis of the "geography" of the beneficial owners of income from the Russian source, the relationship between the jurisdiction of registration of parent companies of taxpayers and the average amount of additional corporate income tax due to non-compliance with the status of the FPA was established. It is concluded that in the overwhelming majority of tax disputes on the status of the FPA, foreign companies – recipients of income were recognized by the courts as conduit companies created to take advantage of registration in low-tax jurisdictions and abuse the provisions of international tax treaties. It was revealed that over the past seven years, the reason for the outflow of capital from the country was the desire of taxpayers to reduce the effective tax rate by withdrawing profits to low-tax jurisdictions, in which large firms prefer Singapore for structuring cash flows in most cases.

Information Сapacity of Globalized Text Content: Museum Website as a Translation Object

The article is devoted to the study of translation and creation of globalized text content of an official cultural and leisure institution website on the example of museum websites. The relevance of this research is due to the need to enlarge the target audience of Russian museums which official websites do not still provide globalized versions in the English language, which the author argues to choose for the reason of its lingua franca status. High-quality text content focused on a global visitor can not only expand the target audience but also yield other benefits for cultural and leisure institutions. The author considers that pragmatics of a potential global recipient requires following certain principles while translating a text from Russian into English or while creating a globalized text based on the Russian original. This work is aimed at studying and analyzing whether the principles of textual information completeness and brevity, which the author views as the basic ones, are followed or not, and which rules are obeyed. The text material selected for analysis is presented by text content fragments displayed on the official websites of world-known Russian museums located in Moscow and St. Petersburg with annual attendance by a vast number of foreign visitors. It is revealed that text simplicity interrelated with text brevity is reached due to transformations at lexical and syntactical levels. The rule of textual information omission is mainly performed when the textual information is irrelevant for a foreign recipient.

International Cash Conduits and Real Estate Empires: A Case Study in Canadian Philanthropic Crime

We analyze an instance of philanthropic law-breaking by a group of Canadian charities, who funnelled millions in tax-exempt funds to foreign recipients. Analyzing 20 years of tax data, we identify a pattern of regulatory violation we are calling the burner charity phenomenon. We track a chronological sequence of organizational behaviour characterized by hibernation, growth, and abandonment, across three linked burner charities. Backstopping burner charities, we show, is a network of public and private foundations. We argue that the purpose of burner charities is to enable foundations to transfer funds to foreign agents while remaining shielded from Canadian law. Combining insights from white collar crime and a Zemiology, we conclude by considering the multi-faceted dimensions of harm associated with burner charities.

Parenting Daughters Does Not Increase Monetary Prosocial Behavior

Abstract. Prior work suggests that parenting daughters makes the preferences of men more in line with those of women. We use behavior in a dictator game as a measure of pure social preferences to test whether parenting daughters increases prosociality, specifically charitable giving. Data are sourced from the German Socio-Economic Panel, where 1,461 participants decided how to split a 50€ endowment between themselves and (separately) a needing domestic or foreign recipient. Our results suggest that parenting daughters does not make men (nor women) more prosocial. The findings remain null across different operationalizations and analytical procedures.

A Proposal for Taking the Complexities Out of Taxing U.S. Retirement Distributions to Foreign Nationals

As the global mobility of workers increases, more and more foreign nationals participate in U.S. retirement plans and eventually receive payments from these plans. The current system for U.S. taxation of these payments is exceedingly complex and uncertain. An elderly recipient of these payments living outside the U.S. finds it difficult and expensive to obtain the tax advice necessary for filing an accurate nonresident Form 1040NR. As a result, many do not file the return, and few are likely to be contacted by the IRS. Whatever tax, if any, was withheld by the payer becomes by default the final tax, even though it is unlikely to correspond with the actual tax liability prescribed by Congress and the applicable U.S. treaty. Moreover, foreign recipients are often able to avoid disclosure of their payments to tax authorities in their home countries.We recommend a new system for taxing retirement payments to foreign nationals that would alleviate these serious administrative burdens. Under our proposal, Congress would establish two withholding rates for these distributions: a low rate of 15% for periodic distributions or minimum required distributions; and a 30 percent rate for other lump sum distributions, which are most conducive to avoiding home country tax and depleting retirement savings. The 30 percent withholding rate would also apply whenever a payee fails to provide documentation of his U.S. or foreign status. These rates would be, by design, the final U.S. tax liability for foreign nationals, who would generally have no need to file a nonresident Form 1040NR. In addition, the Treasury would provide more detailed guidance to payers regarding the types of distributions that qualify for treaty relief; and a recipient’s request for treaty relief would always trigger notification to the home country so as to permit it to collect its own tax. Our proposal would greatly reduce administrative burdens for the IRS, for payers and for payees, and would provide greater assurance that the tax prescribed by Congress and by our treaty partners is accurately collected.

Ономастикон Национального парка «Югыд ва»: лингвокультурологический потенциал

The «Yugyd Va» National Park is one of the unique and largest natural reserves in the world, with the largest array of virgin taiga forests in Europe. Crystal clear natural water is the main value of the park, perhaps its name comes from here - «Yugyd va», in the Komi language means “(lit.) light water”. The originality of natural landscapes, ecologically clean water and air attract travelers. Of particular importance in the tourist discourse are onomastic materials that make it possible to explicate the features of the spiritual and material development of a certain nation at a certain stage of its development. Tribes that have left a unique cultural heritage – historical onomastic realities - have long lived in the specially protected natural territories of the national park. The richness and diversity of the landscape of the studied region, its flora and fauna are reflected in the geographical vocabulary, the formation of which was strongly influenced by related and unrelated languages and dialects. The collected materials allow us to verify the toponymic system associated with the Finno-Ugric and Russian languages. Onomastic material contains a huge socio-cultural potential. Therefore, when studying proper names, one of the main approaches should be to study them as socio-cultural signs that store a significant layer of historical and cultural information. Until recently, researchers underestimated the importance of the socio-cultural component of the proper name, mainly focusing on the study of purely linguistic features, historical and comparative analysis, the presence of a conceptual national component in onyms was practically excluded. Along with the ability to transmit information that is significant to the recipient, onyms representing signs and symbols remain closed to the «uninitiated» or foreign cultural recipients. The identification of the national and cultural specifics of a proper name has an undoubted significance in terms of familiarization with someone else’s culture.

Where the Dialogue Ends: Problems of Reception of Russian Literature in China

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the conflict of interpretations in the perception of the text by a foreign recipient. The study explores reasons for the difficulty of understanding unrealistic works in the Chinese readership and proposes a variant of improving the commentary as an intermediary text. The research is based on the methodological approaches and provisions of the theory of intercultural communication, discourse theory, receptive aesthetics and hermeneutics. As a result of the analysis of the judgments and assessments of Chinese students and specialists in Russian, we identified their main receptive difficulties: difficult understanding of the tropes, omission of allusions, lack of mastery of the language of a particular literary phenomenon. The reason for the latter is the absence of interpretive reading models, which have not been formed due to the long-term ignorance in China of Russian modernist literature. As a result, even today there are conflicts of interpretations, attempts to interpret an unrealistic text in a realistic paradigm. The outdated, ideologically «correct» intermediary texts should be replaced by a new type of commentary. Its model, proposed by the authors of this article, includes the following structural elements: information about the cultural and literary context; clarification of the semantics of words that are important for understanding the text; designation of national stereotypes that can lead to false interpretation and assessment of the text; step-by-step algorithm for working with text; list of references. Such a commentary will allow not only to remove lexical difficulties, but also to form interpretation skills

Проблема понимания специального медицинского текста на русском языке иностранными реципиентами

The research objectives are as follows: to identify specificity of the Russian-language medical text perception among foreign recipients, to reveal causes of the difficulties that foreign medical students face when reading the Russian-language medical texts. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the problem of the medical text perception is for the first time examined from the viewpoint of a foreign reader possessing the basic Russian-language skills. The following conclusions are justified: foreign recipients often experience difficulties in perceiving the Russian-language medical text; these difficulties are often caused by misunderstanding of highly specialized medical terms.

Od adaptacji do spektaklu na motywach dzieła – z doświadczeń glottodydaktycznych

Theatre workshops are not only a creative and effective way to learn a foreign language but also a substantial cultural experience. The article reflects experiences gained by stagings during Summer School of Polish Language, Literature and Culture courses in Cieszyn (University of Silesia). The author introduces adaptation techniques used in transcoding literary works for foreign recipients. Adaptations result in the creation of a new (different) quality of works – sometimes even very loosely based on the original.

Toponyms as Elements of Region-Specific Studies: Problems of Translation (Based on Crimean Toponymy)

The article examines toponymic realia as a means of verbalizing lococentrism in region-specific discourse. Bilingual region-specific texts about Crimea and Sevastopol serve as material for analysing methods of pragmatic adaptation, used in translation of culturally significant toponymic realia that are part of the culturally meaningful vocabulary. As in any translation, when translating toponyms one must consider the primary purpose of translation. If that pur-pose is to ensure that foreign guests should easily find their way around a new linguistic and cultural space, the translator’s task will be to recreate the initial sound of toponyms so that foreign recipients may accurately and quickly identify local realia. Conversely, if the purpose of translation is to introduce foreigners to the local history and culture, the main task of the translator will be to render pragmatic meanings and culturally significant connotations of toponyms, paying particular attention to symbolic and axiologically important objects. After a comprehensive analysis of the material, we have concluded that the most efficient method that allows the translator to accentuate culturally valuable characteristics of toponyms is the “add-on” translation (when a specific culture-focused commentary is introduced into the translated text). In our work we used methods of contextual, semantic, conceptual, and comparative analysis to identify the pragmatic status and the degree of cultural importance of toponymic realia, and to determine the best way of their pragmatic adaptation in translation. The results of the study may be used by translators working with region-specific tourism-related literature, travel periodicals and websites, especially those that are dedicated specifically to Crimea and Sevastopol. The present study may also be helpful at the initial stage of pre-translation analysis when the translator has to determine the pragmatic function of the original text and the type of region-specific vocabulary predominant in it.

Model Soviet City of the Brezhnev Era: The Image of Kharkiv in Selected Propaganda Texts

The aim of the paper is to present the image of Kharkiv in propaganda materials from the period of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule addressed to foreign recipients. Three key threads repeated in narratives about Kharkiv were distinguished by the author: the relative “youth” of the city, its industrial character and the functioning of a strong academic center. The critical analysis of the propaganda discourse is based on the assumption that the language used was the carrier of ideology, i.e. it did not report reality, but its ideological vision. The image of Kharkiv emerging from the analysis is a vision of a city fulfilling the model Soviet standard: neither a communist ideal that Moscow was nearing, nor one with the exotic flair of the Caucasus or Central Asia. It was a Soviet model typicality: a large, modern industrial metropolis, ideologically correct, exemplifying the core, Slavic-European part of the USSR. Thus its promotion was in fact the promotion of the Soviet system as a whole.

Single-step transfer of biosynthetic operons endows a non-magnetotactic Magnetospirillum strain from wetland with magnetosome biosynthesis.

The magnetotactic lifestyle represents one of the most complex traits found in many bacteria from aquatic environments and depends on magnetic organelles, the magnetosomes. Genetic transfer of magnetosome biosynthesis operons to a non-magnetotactic bacterium has only been reported once so far, but it is unclear whether this may also occur in other recipients. Besides magnetotactic species from freshwater, the genus Magnetospirillum of the Alphaproteobacteria also comprises a number of strains lacking magnetosomes, which are abundant in diverse microbial communities. Their close phylogenetic interrelationships raise the question whether the non-magnetotactic magnetospirilla may have the potential to (re)gain a magnetotactic lifestyle upon acquisition of magnetosome gene clusters. Here, we studied the transfer of magnetosome gene operons into several non-magnetotactic environmental magnetospirilla. Single-step transfer of a compact vector harbouring >30 major magnetosome genes from M. gryphiswaldense induced magnetosome biosynthesis in a Magnetospirillum strain from a constructed wetland. However, the resulting magnetic cellular alignment was insufficient for efficient magnetotaxis under conditions mimicking the weak geomagnetic field. Our work provides insights into possible evolutionary scenarios and potential limitations for the dissemination of magnetotaxis by horizontal gene transfer and expands the range of foreign recipients that can be genetically magnetized.

Market integration accounts for local variation in generalized altruism in a nationwide lost-letter experiment

What explains variation in levels of prosocial behavior across communities? And are members of the ingroup and outgroup treated differently? According to evolutionary theories of generalized altruism, market integration should lead to greater levels of prosociality: Market exchange forces people to interact with unknown others, thus creating the conditions for the extension of prosocial behavior beyond close-knit circles to include outgroup members and strangers. Moving away from the evolutionary focus on cross-cultural variation, this article uses the market-integration hypothesis to explain intracultural variation in levels of prosociality in an advanced society. Taking advantage of an ideal setting, this study reports results from a large-scale, nationwide lost-letter experiment in which 5,980 letters were dispersed in a sample of 188 Italian communities. The study confirms the relevance of market integration in accounting for differences in levels of prosociality: In areas where market exchange is dominant, return rates are high. It also casts a light on the relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality: Return rates for both Italian and foreign recipients are the same; they vary together; and ingroup returns are highly predictive of outgroup returns at the community level.

Cybersecurity, Encryption, and Defense Industry Compliance with United States Export Regulations

Cybersecurity, Encryption, and Defense Industry Compliance with United States Export Regulations

Pragmatics of Translating Tourism Discourse Texts

The article presents translation analysis of the texts within tourism discourse. According to the authors, the Internet is the most popular source of information and thus tourist websites are aimed at forming tourism attractiveness of a certain region as well as promoting regional branding. As illustrated by examples of multilingual hotel websites, the language component of website content is an essential factor for translation. As a result, the analysis of data shows that in many translations various errors are made, which are characterized by a violation of stylistic, lexical, grammatical, spelling and punctuation norms or rules, consequently, translated texts do not correspond to their original communicative and pragmatic function. Having studied the original examples, the authors prove that the translated text in the tourism discourse performs its main function, i.e. attracts a large number of potential customers only when a professional translator while translating generates a new text, taking into account grammatical and linguistic norms of the language of translation, as well as maintaining stylistic imagery and colour in accordance with a specific lingua-culture of a foreign recipient.