Oblique Strategies Research Articles

Problems of Translating Informal Greeting Expressions Used in Iraqi Arabic into English

Greeting expressions represent an important part of conversation and are considered a fundamental element in the Arabic culture. Arabic language has more various and colorful greeting expressions with a culture-specific nature than other languages. However, dealing with the translation of such expressions, especially the Iraqi Arabic informal ones, poses a significant problem for translators, complicating the task of translating these expressions accurately and appropriately. Therefore, this study aims to identify the problems translators face when translating informal Iraqi Arabic greetings into English. To achieve this aim, a total of (4) informal greeting expressions collected from the Iraqi Arabic community were used as a sample of the study. These expressions were distributed to (5) MA candidates, from the Department of Translation, College of Arts, University of Tikrit, representing the subjects of the study to translate them into English. As for the data analysis, the study employed Vinay and Darbelnet's (1995) direct and oblique strategies of translation. The results showed that the study subjects face numerous problems in translating greeting expressions, mainly due to the lack of understanding the cultural contexts in which these expressions are used, in addition to the difficulty of finding a one-word equivalent to the informal greeting expressions under study.

Translating English for Specific Purposes (ESP) : A Strategy Analysis

This study is about translation strategies for translating English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The strategies applied refer to Vinay and Dalbenet Theory, which consists of Direct (Borrowing, Calque, Literal, and Transposition) and Oblique methods (Modulation, Equivalent, and Adaptation). This study aims to determine the strategies students apply when translating ESP texts and how the students' educational backgrounds impact this process. Descriptive qualitative was applied as the methodology using tests and interviews to collect the data. The result showed that 6 of 7 translation strategies are implemented by translators. To implement direct translation, it has applied all strategies: borrowing, calque, literal translation, and transposition strategies. Thus, oblique strategies are used in equivalent and adaptation strategies, but modulation strategies did not exist from the target language. The next issue is that the background significantly influences the accuracy of word choice in the target language. Some translators acknowledge needing help translating vocabulary that seems more common than some terminology they frequently encounter when taking the classes.

‘Forlorn on the Fringe of Life’: Exploring Working-Class Childhood in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Abstract In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.

Forms of Intelligence: Co-species Care in More-than-human Worlds

The project consisted of a series of collaborative online workshops between eight people from Knowle West, Bristol, Kent, and Colombia over August and September 2020 with expertise in different forms of animal and plant intelligence. These people ranged in age from 18-80 and included community activists, artists, and researchers with specialisms in spiders and ants, trees, fungi, butterflies and local wildlife, soil, coral, gardening, bees, dogs, birds, robotics, wearables, performance and visual arts. The group came together on the project to share knowledge, create principles for collaborating well across species and to begin exploring what could be made that would benefit humans, animals, plants and environments in more connected ways. The cards were inspired by, amongst other things, tarot and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards, as well as other types of card games (such as Cards Against Humanity) and creative inspiration techniques from artistic and design practices.

Roberto Arlt and the Readers of Romance

This essay examines the role of female readership in the work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt. I argue that the conflicted and embodied status of the reading public in Arlt’s work is crystallized in the female (or feminized) reader of romances. Through this figure, the Arltian text reveals the pervasiveness of normative sentimental discourse, and narrates how this discourse circulates, impacts, and is absorbed by the bodies of its readers. These critiques emerge quite clearly in Arlt’s novels, where the author enjoys greater freedom of expression. However, his periodical publications and theater necessarily employ a more oblique critical strategy. Focusing on his aguafuertes, the short story “Eugenio Delmonte y los 1300 novios” and the play Trescientos millones, I show how Arlt interpolates his readers as readers of romance while also enacting a rupture in the boundary between the work and the medium in which it appears, encouraging the reader’s awareness of the influence of those media in her daily life. 

Co-creating Possible Futures of Light, Beyond Lighting. A Hybrid Approach: Format Design, Preliminary Findings, and Reflexive Learnings From a Foresight Practice, Based on a Creative Industry Event Series

The research context for this article is a specific lighting industry professional event, focusing on the possible future of light across the dimensions of body, object (both human-scale and building), and metropolis. Light becomes the theme to generate visions and insights about longer term developments from personal, social, and business viewpoints. The event was designed as a location-specific format for the multi-awarded Silo 486, Helsinki, by Lighting Design Collective. The format is inspired by Brian Eno’s 1970s “Oblique Strategies,” therefore an approach derived from fine arts and popular culture, within the constructivist episteme. The specific target of this event is thought leaders and/or the next generation of architectural, design, and creative industry leaders, with an invitation list of 15–20, selected according to the “Elite Club” open innovation principle (Verganti et al., 2008). The event was held three times, from 2014 through 2016, during the Helsinki Design Week, as integral part of its program. The authors were main initiator and moderator of the event, as they designed the format in 2014.

Oblique Strategies: Rumors of a Constitutional Coup in Hungary

Oblique Strategies: Rumors of a Constitutional Coup in Hungary

Translation of French Copula into Turkish by Oblique Strategies

Research in translation studies focuses on the study of mandatory components such as input, process, output and the central actor. In this study, in order to obtain some data on the translation process, the choice of the translator is being revised by comparing input and output. Referred to as “process” or “translation strategy” in the field of translation studies, these choices are grouped into two: direct and indirect translation processes. The article provides a brief description of translation studies, followed by a brief description of the indirect translation strategies. Then, the type of verb known as “ilgi eylemi” or “koşaç” in Turkish and “copule” or “verbe attributif” in French is described syntactically and both languages are compared. In the research section, 131 examples of translations collected from three texts are examined to determine the reasons for choosing the indirect translation strategy. By examining the 38 examples in which the copula is translated into a verb other than the “imek” and “olmak” verbs, we try to get the answer for the research question. The research revealed that translation strategy is imposed more by the regenerated context of the target discourse than by the individual preferences of the translator. In other words, the translator tries to create a fluid and equivalent text according to the criteria of the target language when recreating the text after the reception and interpretation process. The results of the study show that the concept of translation strategy should be taught during translator training.

Simple and complex cognitive modelling in oblique translation strategies in a corpus of English–Spanish drama film titles

Abstract This article provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the translation of English drama film titles into Peninsular Spanish, drawing on cognitive modelling and following preliminary findings in Peña-Cervel (2016). Our study is consistent with the epistemological and ontological grounding of Cognitive Linguistics (Samaniego-Fernández 2007) and contributes to satisfying one of the major challenges Rojo-López and Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013a, 10) identify for present-day Translation Studies: To reveal the conceptual substratum that guides the translation process. Our approach does not rely on an exhaustive classification of clear-cut and well-defined translation techniques, but rather on a broad distinction between direct and oblique strategies. We demonstrate how the notion of cognitive operation, as proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza-Ibáñez and Galera-Masegosa (2014), can help elucidate the sometimes seemingly arbitrary relationship between original English titles and their counterparts in Spanish, especially in cases of traditionally so-called free translations. Stands-for relations, such as expansion and reduction, are shown to play a fundamental role in the translation process and the fruitful combination of cognitive operations into conceptual complexes is explored. Our study attempts to go beyond descriptive adequacy in order to achieve explanatory adequacy.

Pattern Interrupt

Operating in contested fields often requires agile and lateral actions to keep a project moving. Pattern Interrupt was an autonomous, discursive mobile artwork, located outside and between the institutional surroundings of RMIT University. It speculated on the tactical actions needed to work creatively within Melbourne’s public realm via a playful discussion series, augmented through a card game that stimulated the sharing of experiences between AAANZ Conference delegates, drawing on their various roles in the field. The cards distilled my accumulated insights from provisional experiments, workarounds and shortfalls as a transdisciplinary practitioner working in public art. They harnessed the language and format of artist instructions such as Oblique Strategies (1975) by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt and early management games, such as Distant Early Warning (1969) by Marshall McLuhan. Operating at the intersection of publication and game, the deck of cards specifically challenged the linear format of a book or presentation as a way to distil findings from the field. Instead, it was a dynamic set of chance operations that could be reapplied within practice while remaining open to multiple interpretations. As a live laboratory, it articulated and activated knowledge/s drawn from the public realm. It offered participants an opportunity to find play in bureaucratic systems, and to work around intractable public art predicaments together.

On the Contemporary Visual Experience, Part Two: The Vertical Gaze

As an attempt to critically engage with the contemporary visual experience, this paper in three parts explores the horizontal, vertical, and virtual viewpoints. Its main purpose is to question the virtual realm as a place where technology allows for various visual experiences including new, digital and oblique perspectives on both horizontality and verticality. Various visual examples are taken from: selfie-taking, augmented and virtual realities (“Part One: Vir(tu)al Horizon(tal)”); architectural landscapes, aerial views, panoramas (“Part Two: The Vertical Gaze”); the photographic works of Sebastião Salgado, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, and Terry Boddie (“Part Three: Oblique Strategies”).

On the Contemporary Visual Experience, Part One: Vir(tu)al Horizon(tal)

As an attempt to critically engage with the contemporary visual experience, this paper in three parts explores the horizontal, vertical, and virtual viewpoints. Its main purpose is to question the virtual realm as a place where technology allows for various visual experiences including new, digital and oblique perspectives on both horizontality and verticality. Various visual examples are taken from: selfie-taking, augmented and virtual realities (“Part One: Vir(tu)al Horizon(tal)”); architectural landscapes, aerial views, panoramas (“Part Two: The Vertical Gaze”); the photographic works of Sebastião Salgado, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, and Terry Boddie (“Part Three: Oblique Strategies”).

On the Contemporary Visual Experience, Part Three: Oblique Strategies

As an attempt to critically engage with the contemporary visual experience, this paper in three parts explores the horizontal, vertical, and virtual viewpoints. Its main purpose is to question the virtual realm as a place where technology allows for various visual experiences including new, digital and oblique perspectives on both horizontality and verticality. Various visual examples are taken from: selfie-taking, augmented and virtual realities (“Part One: Vir(tu)al Horizon(tal)”); architectural landscapes, aerial views, panoramas (“Part Two: The Vertical Gaze”); the photographic works of Sebastião Salgado, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, and Terry Boddie (“Part Three: Oblique Strategies”).

Arms and the Woman: The Public Intellectual in Zoe Lambert’s The War Tour

This article explores Zoe Lambert’s short story collection, The War Tour (2008), in relation to the debates surrounding the public intellectual and the literary response to the War on Terror. It makes a claim for Lambert’s collection to be considered not only as the work of a public intellectual but that it also contests what it means to be an intellectual at a time of historical crisis. In dwelling upon real-life figures such as the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the physicist Lise Meitner, Lambert also reflects upon her own position as a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition. The relationship to the public sphere is complicated by Lambert’s gender, and of the women that she writes about; a complication which not only unsettles the definition of a public intellectual but is also articulated through the oblique strategies of the short story collection.

The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology

The Algorithmic Writing of Stones:A Cybernetics of Geology Paul Prudence (bio) To know the shape is to enjoy the information it embodies. – Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki, Pebbles to Computers In his classic work of lithic scrying, The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois suggests that the pareidoliac's interpretation of a stone's pattern depends upon her own personal internalized database of stored images, a database defined by the cultural stock of mediated imagery forged and embellished by personal memory, emotion and psychical topography. For Caillois, "the vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it with the treasures of memory and knowledge." Caillois's own database was one defined in a pre-digitized, barely computerized world. His meditations on Agates, Jaspers and Septaria evoked for him a world of grotesque pathologies, fantastic creatures and mythological landscapes devoid of digital allusions. Like the results of a Rorschach test, the imagery he conjured reveals the emotive secrets hidden in the recesses of his own mind. A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois's stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions. The digital age has supplied the directory of the unconscious with a new aesthetic of patterns. Sigils of chaos theory and emblems of emergence provide the imagination with new a gestalt with which to interpret the writing of stones. How do the symbols of this new aesthetic invade our dreams and reconfigure the hard-drive of the collective unconscious? And how might they be refracted back into our view of the world as we invent stories that give meaning to entropy and shape haphazard incidents into coherent narratives? The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined by chaotic parabolas of a Lorenz Attractor. In other rocks, mineral accretions may delineate facsimiles of reaction diffusion patterns—the scattered pointillist aftermaths of activator-inhibitor liaisons. Other patterns tell tales of cellular automata self-assembling themselves into unpredictable, but [End Page 71] scrutable patterns—Conway's Game of Life frozen inside a crystalline snapshot. So, the stones become a collective unconscious for dynamical systems, an oblique strategy for algopoetic revelry, and a divination system for generative pattern recognition. Though Caillois's readings prefigure the emergence of digital culture, there are some tantalizing references and delicate clues in his writing, almost as if he were peering into the future and blindly feeling his way through to a possible computational interpretation of his stones. Commenting on one Jasper that he nicknames Orbits, we hear of a concentric ring pattern that "proclaims the orbits of the planets or electrons around invisible nuclei" and whose rings "reflect the phantom revolutions which, alike on a vast and on a microscopic scale, unflaggingly repeat the same pattern." Here he intimately senses the universal constructor function of self-similarity in nature long before chaos theory and fractal mathematics became mainstream. He understands that forms can encapsulate themselves across dimensions, rhythmically repeating themselves to create diminishing echoes of their own signatures towards a proposed infinity, in sometimes maddeningly giddying recursions, mise en abyme. Just as chaos theory has infected every corner of science, the scale invariance found in Orbits, according to Caillois, symbolizes "the blueprint of nature itself." The author often hints at this internal self-reflexivity so essential to natural morphologies at any given scale: "To decipher such writing is to interpret some oft repeated signs so turned in upon themselves that they refer to their own form." And when he explains that "their values are intrinsic and without external reference," might he be imagining a kind of geological Turing Completeness?—a universal lithic calculating machine whose solution is its own morphology (Turing). This possibility echoes the inklings of tantric cybernetician Stafford Beer in Pebbles to Computers who saw that "Nature's computers are that which they compute" and who maintained that "We cannot read off numbers" from these calculations "because nature does not put labels on its solutions—it becomes them" (in Blohm, et al.). The sealed language of stones...

Thinking inside the box: Brian Eno, music, movement and light

ABSTRACT‘In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly’ [Eno, Brian, and Peter Schmidt. (1979). Oblique Strategies. The Authors.]This article considers how Eno has used simple but innovative ideas, programmes and processes to inform his films, apps and installation work. Avoiding spectacle, noise and complexity, Eno and his collaborators have produced an array of intriguing and engaging visual art works. In T. The New York Times Style Magazine, Eno stated that he ‘was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way music changes’ [Eno, Brian. (2013). ‘The Record Producer, Sound Conceptualist Futurist and Artist Extraordinaire on the Academy Couch.’ New York: Red Bull Music Academy. Accessed April 14, 2014]. Kingsley Marshall and Rupert Loydell use remix, juxtaposition and creative writing, along with more traditional research methods, to cast light onto the ways in which appropriation, process and collaboration have informed Eno’s creative output. They use Eno’s own words, along with critiques of his work, and writing by those who have inspired him, to consider how Eno creates his quiet rooms and visual music. Each consecutive response here was dictated by the turn of an Oblique Strategies card.

A Rite of Their Own: Japanese Buddhist Nuns and the Anan kōshiki

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In 2003, the Aichi Senmon Nisodo ... celebrated the onehundredth anniversary of its founding as a training convent for Soto Zen nuns. To commemorate the occasion, the nuns performed the Anan koshiki ..., a chanted lecture commemorating the Buddha's disciple, Ananda, and recorded the event on film. Abbess Aoyama Shundo (b. 1933) wrote the companion volume (2003), which includes a reproduction of a 1829 printing of the Anan koshiki, as well as the abbess's commentary on the ritual and its historical background. The Aichi Senmon Nisodo is probably the only Buddhist institution in Japan at which the Anan koshiki is still performed. Even here this elaborate ritual is staged only for special occasions-approximately every six to eight years-and its performance requires at least twelve nuns who have undergone training in Soto-style koshiki ... and the idiosyncrasies of the Anan koshiki (Arai 2000, 123; Aoyama 2003, 118, 124, 130-31; Kawaguchi 2004, 79).In this article, I trace the history of the Anan koshiki from its precursors in ancient India, China, and Japan, to its compilation in the medieval period and revitalization in the late Edo period. Subsequently, I examine the ritual's contents and assess how the rite depicts women in Buddhist monasticism. I argue that the ritual has functioned polysemously, affirming nuns' marginalization and their lesser status vis-a-vis the male clergy, while also serving as a means for nuns to celebrate their gender difference. Most strikingly, Aoyama's commentary feminizes Ananda, a patriarch of her Zen lineage, as a paragon of female virtues. Thus she symbolically turns Ananda into a great heroine rather than a great hero, thereby completing an inversion of a common medieval rhetorical tactic employed by Zen masters who masculinized exceptional women as great heroes.1 The Anan koshiki, its performance, and Aoyama's commentary contain oblique strategies of inversion and self-affirmation that allow the nuns to employ androcentric concepts to suit their own interests and agendas, to borrow Saba Mahmood's language (Mahmood 2005, 6).Precursors of the Anan koshikiRituals in praise of Ananda have a long history within the female monastic order of Buddhism. Early Indian Buddhist women-nuns in particular-were said to have an affinity with Ananda, who not only convinced the Buddha to admit women to the monastic order but was also extraordinarily popular with female Buddhist devotees who flocked to his sermons. He is described as having a fiercely loyal following within the Buddhist nuns' order. For instance, the nun Thullatissa purportedly defended Ananda when he was criticized and belittled by Mahakasyapa. Thullatissa upbraided Mahakasyapa in obvious violation of the Eight Heavy Rules that forbade nuns to chastise male monastics. In a similar story, the nun Sthulananda disrobed herself in front of Mahakasyapa in order to chastise Mahakasyapa and support Ananda. In that case, Ananda is said to have responded apologetically by describing himself as stupid, crazy, and feminine (Wilson 1996, 108-109, 229). In other words, Ananda characterized himself with qualities that Buddhist texts often stereotypically associate with women. From a male perspective, Ananda's close relationships with nuns and women were generally depicted as reprehensible and signs of weakness. Yet for women, Ananda's concern for and compassion toward them were not grounds for criticism but instead elicited veneration.Katsuura Noriko (2008, 104-107) has traced the first evidence of nuns' devotional rituals for Ananda to the travelogues of Chinese monks Faxian ... (337-422) and Xuanzang ... (602-664), who depict their journeys to the Indian subcontinent. Both monks document such rituals at Mathura, a site at which nuns had a strong presence and were highly involved in the emerging cult of images (Schopen 1997, 238-57). In his Foguoji ... (Record of Buddhist countries), Faxian reports that, in about 405, he witnessed Buddhist nuns (bhiksu? …

Out of context: ‘Control & Surrender’ revisited and remixed

Abstract A self-reflective consideration of remixing, reconsidering and (re-)presenting live a previously written collaborative book chapter on Brian Eno’s collaborations and his use of Oblique Strategies cards. The piece also considers the presentation in relation to other papers at the Modular Forms conference at Roehampton University, and was written in response to randomly drawn Oblique Strategies cards.

‘The riddle of the frontier’: Winston Churchill, the Malakand Field Force and the rhetoric of imperial expansion

Historians have frequently identified the young Winston Churchill as an opponent of the so-called ‘forward policy’, which involved the expansion of British control in the north-west frontier region of India. Yet careful reading of his war journalism reveals that he was strongly in favour of the policy, which he attempted to vindicate in his first book. Contemporary reviews reveal that this was recognized at the time. Later scholars have been misled, however, by Churchill's rhetorical stance, which has brought them to overplay the extent of his (genuine) doubts about how British frontier policy was conducted. Churchill consciously chose a ‘circuitous’ method of defending the forward policy, the continuation of which he presented as unavoidable in the light of decisions taken earlier. His intervention in this heated controversy casts light on the oblique strategies that late Victorian imperial expansionists used to advance their case.

Oblique Strategies for Ambient Journalism

Alfred Hermida recently posited ‘ambient journalism’ as a new framework for para- and professional journalists, who use social networks like Twitter for story sources, and as a news delivery platform. Beginning with this framework, this article explores the following questions: How does Hermida define ‘ambient journalism’ and what is its significance? Are there alternative definitions? What lessons do current platforms provide for the design of future, real-time platforms that ‘ambient journalists’ might use? What lessons does the work of Brian Eno provide–the musician and producer who coined the term ‘ambient music’ over three decades ago? My aim here is to formulate an alternative definition of ambient journalism that emphasises craft, skills acquisition, and the mental models of professional journalists, which are the foundations more generally for journalism practices. Rather than Hermida’s participatory media context I emphasise ‘institutional adaptiveness’: how journalists and newsrooms in media institutions rely on craft and skills, and how emerging platforms can augment these foundations, rather than replace them.