Literal Sense Research Articles

The Influence of Chinese and Western Cultural Differences on English Translation and Its Countermeasures

Abstract English plays an irreplaceable role as a bridge of global communication. However, the cultural differences between China and the West have a profound impact on English learning and translation practice, resulting in the reduction of semantic accuracy and information richness, which damages the effect of communication and restricts the style of translation. These cultural differences not only lead to understanding errors in the translation process, but also lead to the loss of cultural connotation, the conflict of expression and the mismatch of logical structure, thus increasing the complexity and challenge of English translation. To solve these problems, this paper suggests some strategies to alleviate the influence of Chinese and Western cultural differences on English translation, such as enhancing the training of cultural awareness, improving the accurate grasp of the context, flexibly adjusting the ways of language expression and optimizing the logical expression structure. In addition, it is emphasized that while mastering language skills, English learners should deeply understand and respect the cultural background of the source language and the target language, so as to improve the quality of translation and the effectiveness of communication. These measures will help English learners to translate and apply English more accurately and freely, not only in the literal sense of the language, but also in the cultural level.

The Commodification of the Womb: A Historical Attack on Black Women’s Reproductive Freedom

The commodification of the Black body is a process deeply rooted in slavery that has transcended a century’s worth of political and social change since abolition. In a literal sense, within the context of slavery, the Black body was commodified as both a force of labour and a resource for reproduction to feed the growth of America’s slave economy. In the present day, the commodification of the Black body has taken on a political and metaphorical meaning; Black women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom are commonly used as a form of political currency for anti-abortion lobbyists throughout the United States. This paper covers the history of the commodification of Black women’s bodies while also displaying the ways in which Black women’s reproductive and bodily autonomy are targeted today. Drawing on theories of the fragmented commodity, the right to privacy, and reproductive freedom, this paper displays modern issues that are part of a historical continuity of targeting black women and their right to freedom.

Ecogothic Interpretations of the Anthropocene

The so-called nonhuman turn has a great role to play in theoretical elaborations of the Anthropocene. This broad tendency of thought incorporates contemporary non-anthropocentric schools of thought such as Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and posthumanism. These various sociological and philosophical directions have one thing in common: the rejection and transcendence of anthropocentrism, as well as a new sensitivity to the heterogeneous, irreducible and multiple nature of reality. Openness to post-anthropocentrism is a general characteristic of authors who work in Anthropocene theory today. However, posthumanist philosophy, while it decenters and deconstructs the human, is also committed to an aesthetic of uncertainty, fear, and even horror. Simon C. Estok, in his highly important article “Theorising the EcoGothic,” shows that during the ecological crisis philosophical thought must traverse unknown terrain, while also emphasizing the darker aspects of sociocultural constructs. Posthumanism must, by its very nature, prepare for the unthinkable in a quite literal sense according to Stefan Herbrechter. The Anthropocene constitutes an opening to what Nick Land calls “Outsideness”. A future condition “after” the human can be understood as a condition that opens onto a dark, monstrous, threatening or, in a word, hybrid future beyond any anthropic measure.

Mediating Antiquity in Mehmed ʿAli's Egypt: Rationalism and Its Limits in Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi's Ancient History Textbook

The major project of Arab Nahda studies since the mid-2000s has been to develop an understanding of the Nahda that goes beyond the movement's own self-understanding; that is, beyond its rhetoric of “awakening” (the literal sense of nahḍa), national renewal, and rupture with the recent past. Scholars have approached this task in a variety of ways, notably by retracing continuities between 19th-century Arabic cultural production and that of earlier centuries; by analyzing the economic underpinnings of the culture of the Nahda and the salience of local class interests in its formation; by studying the relevance of transnational circulations of ideas; by investigating popular culture; and through detailed studies of individual figures and of subjective experience in the period.1 A central challenge in this reconceptualizing of the Nahda has been that of accurately identifying and explaining the shifts within the era; that is, in a way that neither simply reproduces the movement's conception of itself, nor fails to appreciate properly the social transformations of which the Nahda was a part. This challenge has been tackled with impressive results in certain domains of cultural production, notably the intersection between print culture and Islamic thought.2

Makna Frasa “ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ” dalam Yohanes 1:29

One of the theological titles addressed to Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God. This title can be found in John 1:29 and 1:36 which is the title of John the Baptist to Jesus,and is not found in the Synoptic Gospels. A number of scholars have attempted to interpret the phrase Lamb of God both in a literal and figurative sense and there are a number of different meanings. In this paper, the author seeks the meaning of the phrase Lamb of God in John 1:29 using the exegetical method. The exegetical method used three analyses: contextual analysis, historical, and grammatical and literal analysis. From the analysis carried out, it was found that the meaning of the phrase Lamb of God which is directed at Jesus explains the work of Jesus' salvation through His death on the cross which brought redemption and remission of sins for humans by taking Jewish background: the Passover lamb, and the divine qualities possessed by Christ as the Lamb of God.

On the Connotation of "Idea" and Its Metaphor in "Killing Commendatore"

Haruki Murakami's "Killing Commendatore" intricately divides its narrative into two pivotal chapters: "The Idea Made Visible" and "The Shifting Metaphor," both of which play a critical role in the thematic and philosophical depth of the novel. The concept of "idea" draws inspiration from Plato's Theory of Forms, particularly illustrated through the "three beds theory," where ideas represent the purest, most abstract forms of understanding and existence, transcending the physical realm. Murakami uses this philosophical backbone to explore the tangible manifestations of ideas within the novel's world, suggesting that what we perceive in reality is merely a reflection of these higher truths. On the other hand, "metaphor," as utilized throughout the novel, serves as a bridge between the abstract world of ideas and the tangible experiences of the characters. Metaphors permeate the narrative, weaving through various "idea" worlds, and acting as vessels that carry deeper meanings beyond their literal sense. This literary device enables Murakami to delve into complex themes of isolation, art, and the human condition, allowing readers to navigate through layers of meaning. The interplay between "ideas" and "metaphors" is not merely juxtapositional but is deeply interconnected. Through this dynamic interaction, Murakami crafts a universe where ideas and metaphors coalesce, creating an undercurrent of thought and reflection that invites readers into a multidimensional exploration of reality and imagination. This synthesis of philosophical inquiry and literary craftsmanship marks "Killing Commendatore" as a profound meditation on the nature of creativity and perception.

PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION STUDIES IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH IDIOMS

This article discusses problems of translation studies in the study of English idioms, their meaning and classification, as well as the influence of idioms on speech, language learning, and literature. English in the modern world is one of the main languages spoken by more than a billion people. It has a huge history, during which many stable phrases and expressions were included in it. Idioms exist in almost all languages; they are phrases or expressions that have a symbolic meaning and cannot be understood in a literal sense. Reflecting everyday situations and metaphors, idioms help convey certain ideas or concepts in language.

Discerning the Letter: Erasmus and Luther on the Literal Sense of Psalm 2

Abstract This comparative study will examine the ways Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther understood the literal sense of Scripture in their expositions of Ps 2. Building off of G. Sujin Pak’s book, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms, this study seeks to incorporate Erasmus and compare his exegesis and hermeneutic to the early Luther’s expositions of Ps 2. The article aims to demonstrate how these two exegetes converged (and diverged) in their understanding of the literal sense and to explore what part the literal sense played in their interpretation of Scripture. Further, it will consider the relationship these exegetes have to their antecedent exegetical tradition as well as the role history and philology played in their exegesis and how Christ was related to the literal sense of Scripture. The final section of this study ends with a recommendation for contemporary biblical scholars and theologians in the task of biblical interpretation today.

Placing animals in the Plantationocene: The plantation after/lives of nutria in Eastern Germany

Nutria ( Myocastor coypus), also known as coypu or ‘river rats’, are big semi-aquatic rodents that originate from South America and were shipped to Europe for fur production in the late 1800s. Today, the animals live in wild populations in many places around the globe. One of these places is the Eastern German city of Halle is where they have been able to establish themselves in large populations along the river Saale. This article situates the history and presence of nutria in Eastern Germany in the Plantationocene. The Plantationocene concept regards the plantation as a structuring feature of our present. In the plantation, humans and nonhumans are separated, hierarchically ordered and exploited along different power axes, so that standardised, scalable production becomes possible. In this sense, we argue that the nutria farms of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) followed plantation logics that resembled that of ‘actual’ plantations and that exploited their forced animal labour for fur production. With German reunification, however, nutria lost their economic value and, in many cases, were simply released to save on ‘disposal costs’. Outside the nutria farms, they developed plantation afterlives, where similar logics continued to exert violence on their bodies, such as in their recent classification as ‘invasive alien species’, but were also challenged in a number of ways. Taking cue from recent discussions on the Plantationocene, this article can be considered as an intervention and invitation to move beyond the plantation in the literal sense of the term, so as to study how the Plantationocene works across different species, spaces and times, while being attentive to its limitations.

Рец. на кн.: James Ferguson. Presence and Social Obligation: An Essay of Share. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2021. 85 p.

Developing an idea of his previous book Give a Man a Fish (2015), the new publication by James Ferguson deepens the theoretical basis for such a distributive policy as universal basic income. The author considers it necessary to review the prevailing grounds for the distribution of resources, namely labor and citizenship. Referring to materials from southern Africa and scholarly works about huntergatherer societies, Ferguson introduces yet another ground for distribution — presence. A rather open-ended “Being here, among us” in a literal sense of the word can be enough to guarantee the rightful share. Providing anthropological arguments Ferguson not only explains the necessity and possibility of a new global distributive policy, but also declares that the analytical potential of the presence concept should be developed. In the review this approach is associated with the theory from the south by John and Jean Comaroff. Besides, from the reviewer’s point of view, in Presence and Social Obligation Ferguson creates one possible theoretical ground for anarchism. Therefore it is noted that the book under review could be a starting point for rethinking the place and the role of anthropology in political projects.

Ouch: Pain, Heard and Referred

The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression and witnessing of physical pain. Instances of what was classified in the nineteenth century as sensation literature, these three texts produce direct sensory effects. Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) is a horror novel, William Goldman’s Marathon Man (1974) a thriller, and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) (film: 127 Hours) an adventure-survival memoir. Reading pain in each of three triple texts—book, film, and the screenplay transmitting pain from one to the other—opens up a new archive of pain texts that promise sensation rather than relief, offering a new perspective on the imaginative—and paradoxically ameliorative—creativity brought into being by the notorious recalcitrance of pain. This essay argues for attention to the protolinguistic pain language of groans and screams; for a poetics of “ouch.”

Скопцы и скопчество в романе Ф. М. Достоевского «Идиот»

The paper examines the role of the “skopchestvo” theme in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Idiot”. The aim of the study is to identify the meaning of references to the “skoptsy’s” neighborship in Rogozhin’s house. The study is original in that it is the first to consider the “skopchestvo” theme using an interdisciplinary approach, that is, based on research directly devoted to the phenomenon of skopchestvo. As a result of the study, it was found that the novel’s comparison of Rogozhin’s house with a cemetery in the light of the “skopchestvo” theme takes on a new meaning: it can be understood not only as an association with the Rogozhsky cemetery – a famous Old Believer center, but also with a cemetery in the literal sense, since castrations also occurred where the skoptsy settled, often ending in the death of the adherents. In this same regard, one should also understand the fear expressed by Nastasya Filippovna that a dead person was “hidden” in Rogozhin’s house by his father not as a mystical, but a completely rationally explainable fear. Also, the role of the copy of the painting “The Dead Christ in the Tomb” in Rogozhin’s house receives a new explanation: an anti-schismatic and anti-sectarian theme is clearly introduced into the novel. A “copy” of ritual actions among schismatics, observance of traditions without liturgical communication with the church and without enlightenment also turn out to be “dead”: there is no Christ, Christ is dead in the schism, which replaced faith with ritual, and even more so, there is no Christ in skopchestvo, where, manipulating religious feelings, they maim people.

On Beall’s contradictory Christology and beyond

According to Conciliar Christology, Christ has a divine nature and a human nature. This dual nature of Christ leads us to face many apparent inconsistencies: For example, it seems to follow that He is both immutable and mutable (and, therefore, not immutable). This long-standing issue in Christology has been called the fundamental problem of Christology. Recently, Jc Beall has proposed a novel approach to the fundamental problem: contradictory Christology, that is, Christology which takes those apparent inconsistencies as genuinely contradictory. This paper examines Beall’s contradictory Christology by comparing it with James Anderson’s version of consistent Christology. Such a comparison highlights an important assumption of Beall’s contradictory Christology, that is, the language used to state the fundamental problem is univocal. ‘Immutable’ is, thus, used in the same literal sense in both `Christ is immutable’ and `Christ is not immutable’. On the one hand, this assumption has a good reason given the human nature of Christ. On the other hand, we follow Anderson in showing that the view that `immutable’ is equivocal has a good reason too. For there is an established theological tradition according to which, when we speak about the divine, our language is analogical. In light of those considerations, this paper presents a semantic explication of how the predicates used to state the fundamental problem are both literal and analogical. The proposed semantics treats those predicates as cases of multiple denotations and shows that the apparent inconsistencies are genuinely contradictory, but in a different way from Beall’s contradictory Christology.

Elementary Errors: Philosophers, Idolaters, and τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου in Paul and Clement of Alexandria

Abstract Historically, interpreters of Gal. 4 have found the literal sense of τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, “the elements of the world” to be unintelligible in context. Although a compelling Pauline vision of enslavement to these στοιχεῖα has remained elusive, this paper argues that it is possible to recapture that vision with recourse to the traditional usage of the phrase in ancient Greek philosophical literature. By examining one of the earliest extant quotations of Gal. 4 – i.e., that of Clement of Alexandria in his Protrepticus (c.190 CE) – and the philosophical language with which Clement associates Paul’s στοιχεῖα, this paper argues that Paul uses the phrase τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου according to its meaning in the ancient philosophical Sondersprache. Because an ambiguity between matter and divinity already characterized ancient philosophical thought about στοιχεῖα, Paul’s “elements” need not be either “cosmological” or “principial” (as most previous interpreters have thought), but both.

Driving in Cars with Noise

Driving in Cars with Noise

Production of value-added cosmetic products from cold-pressed Helianthus annuus L. oil and pulp

Recycling, in its literal sense, is the recycling of obsolete recyclable waste materials into manufacturing processes as raw materials through various recycling methods. We can say that a lot of waste is generated in environmental and industrial terms. Sunflower (Helianthus annus L.) is one of the major oil crops grown in the world for the production of edible and biodiesel oil. A large number of plant and raw material wastes, especially those used in food products, are recycled into cleaning, health, cosmetic and industrial products. In this study, the cold-pressed oil and pulp obtained from the seeds of the sunflower plant were evaluated and transformed into an added-value cosmetic product. Especially the fact that it contains other valuable compounds such as phenolic compounds, fatty acids, fibers, vitamins, minerals and polyphenols increases the popularity of the value-added product. Within the scope of our work, we produced two value-added products. These products are creams containing sunflower oil, which has nourishing, moisturizing and protective properties and the other product is a skin mask containing sunflower pulp. As our university specializes in added-value agricultural products, our product production is increasing day by day.

‘Odd and incorrect’: Convention and Jane Eyre’s Feminist Legacy

This article investigates the Victorian reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the collision of literary criticism with political commentary. Brontë’s novel has always had a reputation for being politically troublesome, but no one seems to know why. My essay develops two claims. First, I argue that the novel’s political slipperiness stems from its critics’ inability to agree on what the work actually is. Jane Eyre provoked contradictory judgements from readers who could not reconcile it with existing frameworks of literary convention. The stakes were high, as attempts to define the novel’s genre fused with attempts to produce a coherent sense of literary and social history. Second, I argue that the liberal feminist subject that modern criticism projects backwards onto Jane Eyre did not exist for Victorian readers, and that Brontë’s governess heroine instead activates a historically fraught relationship between character, type, and women’s economic and legal roles. Rather than addressing Jane Eyre directly, I treat it as the absent centre of a debate over convention, waged in reviews, pamphlets and essays, that merged literary criticism with political commentary and set crucial precedents for mid-Victorian legal debates on the woman question.

Normative act in the administrative litigation legislation and practice: definition and distinction from similar phenomena

The article indicates that, regardless of the form of the official document, the fact that it governs through its generally binding provisions the legal status (establishment, change or termination of rights and duties) of an unlimited circle of participants in legal relations to which this official document applies (the general direction of the rules of conduct) rather than covering only specifically defined (personified) persons - are sufficient conditions for ascertaining the normative nature of a particular official document or its certain provisions. It was established that if an official document is not characterized by these properties or only one of them is inherent in it (mandatory nature of the rule of conduct that it establishes, changes or terminates, its general orientation and the possibility of its repeated application), then this indicates that a document belongs to acts of official interpretation of legal norms (including those that are formally binding for their issuers) or acts of application of law (including administrative acts), public policy documents or other official documents.
 In addition, the author drew attention to the fact that, unlike normative acts, individual legal acts are formally binding for specific (clearly determined) persons and define only their individual rights and/ or duties within particular situations, exhausting their legal validity after their settlement. Equally important is the correct separation of normative acts from acts of official interpretation (clarification) of law, which, having a general nature and being calculated for the use of their interpretatory provisions during the period of validity of respective legal rules are not legally binding for participants in legal relations regulated by the relevant law. At the same time, it was noted that according to established judicial practice, which is based on the principles of the rule of law (primarily, on legal certainty as its component) and good governance, acts of official interpretation (clarification) of legal rules, as a general rule, bind their issuers, but due to the lack of such an effect for other participants in the respective legal relationships, these acts are not universally binding in the literal sense of this feature.

Не пренебрегая «реакционным»

The article addresses the question of why, despite the seemingly long-standing accumulation of economic and technical conditions sufficient for building, if not communism, then socialism, the left-wing forces are unable to take advantage of this, and yield the initiative to the right-wing, conservative, and even reactionary forces. The author explains this situation by the rationale that the mindset of the left is still dominated by a flat liberal progressivism characterized by cliché ideas about the progressive and the reactionary, but it lacks tools to adequately assess the reasons for the “reactionary” sympathies of the broad masses and to admit that these masses have “grounds for concern” at the very least. As a theoretical basis, the article uses the concept of human prehistory of the classics of Marxism. The author demonstrates that the underlying dichotomy of the alienated and authentic, human and inhuman does not coincide with the dichotomy of “reactionary” and “progressive”. The Modern Age is examined as both an epoch of reaction (in the literal sense of the word, net of ideological connotations) and that of progress. In order to resolve these issues, the author introduces the concept of retropractice, which is supposed to help adequately describe these seemingly “reactionary” and “conservative” sides of Modernity. Retropractices, in contrast to “reaction”, possess an emancipatory and alienation-reducing potential. The flaw of the left is that they fail to comprehensively conceptualize the meaning of retropractices because they view them only as “reaction” and “conservatism” in the usual sense. However, socialism, if realized, will largely turn out to be precisely a set of retropractices.

We’ll be able to hang out when there’s no coronavirus. On safe spaces in Polish pandemic playscapes

The outburst of the coronavirus pandemic in Poland has led to specific measures related to covid, which affected unequally different age groups. Children were presented as “spreaders” of the disease, and a threat to the societies’ safety. Such fears led to new disciplining practices, such as prohibiting children from leaving the house without adult’s supervision during the first wave of pandemic in Poland. In the consequence of those special measures, the pandemic crisis challenged and blurred some previously existing boundaries, such as those between home and school, private and public, health and illness, online and offline, etc. In this paper, we examine how Polish children experienced their childhood through playful activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from three different research projects conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland, we reflect on the children’s understandings of what is safe. Our focus is on various spaces which either enabled or restrained such activities, and on active work of children in finding and creating a safe space. We argue that, in the circumstances in which known-to-date divisions blurred, children’s seeking of safe spaces, in literal and metaphoric sense, were the means to deal with the new realities. These were primarily negotiable spaces, created through various social practices such as play.