Target Readership Research Articles

Reframing translated news for target readers: a narrative account of news translation in Snowden’s discourses

ABSTRACTThis article studies some of the framing strategies mentioned in extant literature in the Chinese and English versions of news reports on the Edward Snowden case. It analyses a bilingual corpus of 47 news texts in each language. Both the English and Chinese data were collected from Chinese state-owned news agencies. The research results show that even though the news agency that produced the translated news shares the same ideology as the news organization that provided the Chinese news, the translated narratives of the incident were often reframed. We argue that the possible factors that affect the reframing of the narrative include the target readership, the political situation and the political position of the news agency. We also argue that applying a narrative account may help to better explore stance variation in sensitive news translation.

EDITORIAL: The Value of Learned Journals for Health Professionals

As we celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of the African Journal of Reproductive Health (AJRH) this year1, it is apt to consider the changing role of learned journals over the last two decades specially with increasing access to the worldwide web. A much-needed and welcome democratization in the availability of information has been accompanied regrettably by a concomitant overload from continual bombardment by email messages and postings from social media and at websites. As much of that information is not sieved, false news spread at an alarming rate with potentially detrimental effects on clinical consultations when misinformed patients query clinical decisions of health providers and demand inappropriate interventions specially drugs with supposedly miracle effects2. Whereas it is imperative to be selective in accessing information sources to avoid fake news, this approach is becoming difficult lately with the unfortunate official promotion of alternative facts in a post-truth context3. With triage becoming increasingly difficult, there is renewed interest in professional journals and textbooks which are now aimed at not only students but also health planners and development practitioners4. For journal contents, there is the delicate ‗town and gown‘ balance between service provision and academia but that gap is closing with the implementation of evidence-based care. Health journals that developed from broadsheets and newsletters of professional associations5 justifiably continue their role of mouthpiece by including items such as minutes of annual general meeting, reports from committees and administrative notices. Through ownership of a learned journal, a professional association demonstrates that it is not merely a trade union but it is also desirable for the journal editor to be given full independence free from pressure regarding both contents, specially as pertaining to standpoints of the professional association, and financial constraints necessitating advertising revenue. During the first decade of the African Journal of Reproductive Health, three leading medical journals in North America had to revoke their editors over editorial independence6. Peer review of manuscripts is an integral part of the editorial process to ensure the quality of articles published in a learned journal. Whereas guidelines exist, problems can arise in their implementation7. Having the final word, the editor should be impartial, abandon personal interests and neither give-in to pressure groups nor favor friends: a constraining situation similar to that faced by the Speaker in a Westminster-style parliament8. For service provider, policy maker or planner, it is much easier to shoot from the hip by taking decisions spontaneously on the spot as opposed to consulting the health literature for up-to-date evidence. With the electronic age, the vade-mecum in the pocket of the white coat of the clinician has often been replaced by bookmarks on personal digital devices to access reliable websites for official guidelines and online journals. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the health literature is accessible only upon payment thereby making it largely inaccessible in developing countries where practitioners are those most in need. The decision-making process, whether at the bedside or policy desk, should ideally draw upon evidence specially from research findings9,10. Journal articles should clearly state their contribution to the existing body of knowledge. Therefore, the publication of research articles is part of a two-way process: reporting of findings to supplement existing systematic reviews which must be used to formulate subsequent research projects that will uncover new facts11. With the dearth of pertinent findings from low and middle-income countries, this issue is crucial to generate the information database for their implementation of evidence-based practices. With the current trend towards quantification of all issues, metrics are assuming more importance in assessing journals through proxy indices, such as impact factor, which have their own limitations. It should not be forgotten that, in the first place, a journal should meet the specific needs of its target readership whereas prominence on the worldwide web is desirable for generating awareness of journal contents during literature searches. Having its origins within a research centre, the African Journal of Reproductive Health has had an exemplary path as pertaining to editorial independence, quarterly periodicity of publication and quality of articles besides availability of issues at a dedicated website and inclusion in PubMed from the very beginning. Having been recognized as the leading regional journal in its field, the challenge now lies in consolidating its multidisciplinary approach, with a wide perspective on reproductive health, to promote its utilization for policy formulation in the quest for achieving the health-related sustainable development goals.

Masculinity and aspiring consumption: A reception study of men’s lifestyle magazines in contemporary China

Abstract Men’s lifestyle magazines came to China at the turn of the twenty-first century as a result of the commercialization and globalization of the media. Existing investigations of these publications focus on a new form of masculinity that is associated with middle-class identity and the cult of cosmopolitanism that the magazines promote. However, the consumption of men’s lifestyle magazines remains an uncharted area, leaving unanswered such important questions as who the readers of these magazines are, why they read them, and whether there is any discrepancy between their target and actual readerships. Based on two online questionnaire surveys with magazine readers, this study fills this gap by comparing textual readings of Chinese men’s lifestyle magazines with the findings of reader reception studies. It argues that, on the one hand, men’s lifestyle magazines generate fantasies about and project a ‘cosmopolitan masculinity’, particularly among China’s younger generation, that invites fruitful interpretation in light of the concepts of cultural capital and ‘technology of the self’; on the other, however, there is tension between the ideal masculinity featured in these magazines and the real-life perceptions and situations of their readers, primarily owing to a lack of purchasing power. This tension indicates the limitations of the lifestyle magazine, despite its growing power of influence, in the construction of new identities in present-day China.

Building a Trustworthy Corporate Identity: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Stance in Annual and Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

This article presents a corpus-based analysis of stance in a specialized corpus of annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. It investigates how companies use stance expressions to construct and promote a positive corporate identity in order to gain the trust of the stakeholder groups that these texts target. The results show that companies profile distinct identities in annual and CSR reports. In annual reports, they use stance resources to portray themselves as unbiased, rational, and competent decision makers. In CSR reports, they present themselves as committed, honest, and caring corporate citizens. These discursive identities are interpreted as strategic self-representations that optimize the persuasive appeal of the reports by addressing the specific expectations of the target readerships. This study sheds some new light on the identity work performed by companies in their public discourse. It also provides novel insights into the impression management strategies used by companies in annual and CSR reports. Finally, it provides both linguists and business communication scholars with a robust descriptive basis for critically assessing financial and CSR reporting.

Does one report design suit all sorts of readers in the forest sector?

Description of the subject. In the past two decades, new types of reports, such as sustainability reports, have become more important. Normally, issuing reports is a cost-intensive activity; however, the effectivity in terms of communicational success is often unknown. Research about forest reporting has often focused on general acceptance of different reporting concepts. Analysis about the perception of published reports is either uncommon or results may not be published for several internal reasons. Objectives. This double case study aims to identify if conceptual elements of sustainability reporting (SR) meet the expectations of different target groups of public forest enterprises in two German provinces. Method. A three sphere model derived from communication theory is introduced and used to analyze the success of reports in different stakeholder groups. A set of hypotheses is derived from the state of knowledge on sustainability as well as corporate social responsibility reporting and is structured according to the model. The hypotheses are tested on the basis of a double case study. Results. It can be shown that satisfaction with traditional reports is already high; however, structural components of SR are also accepted. Readers want shorter reports and printed versions. Results indicate that the SR concept can be transferred to the readers of forest reports. Differences between stakeholder groups are mainly related to contents and different means of verification. Conclusions. The concept of SR can be basically applied in forest enterprises and meets the expectations of most readers. However, it must be kept in mind that traditional reporting concepts already meet most of the expectations of the relevant target groups. Any effort to implement a new reporting instrument should be supported by an ex ante evaluation of the expectations of the target readership.

Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade by Adam G. Hooks

Adam G. Hooks. Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. CAMBRiDGE UR 2016. 207 pp.IN 2013, THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS published volume titled Stationers, edited by Martha Straznicky, which comprises some ten contributions from British, Canadian, and American professors. The volume draws attention and lends voice to this central figure-at once publisher, pressman, and bookseller-of the early modern book world. To quote the subtitle, the essays presented in the book form part of new discipline-the Cultural Bibliography-advocating greater emphasis on the motivations-the policies, cultural or otherwise-behind the various stakeholders involved in the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of printed works, with acknowledged inspiration from the career paths of major book and reading researchers such as Zachary Lesser, D.F. McKenzie, Robert Darnton, and Roger Chartier.One of the contributors to the 2013 volume, Adam G. Hooks, recently released Selling an example of this recent trend for bibliographical studies. Hooks's goal is to present a new story about life and career in print, story centered not on the man or writer himself, but on the reputation and authorial personae created, bought, and sold by the early modern book trade (3). He seeks to examine the circumstances under which the transition from writer to author (37) took place and the role-in his judgment of underestimated significance-played by the editorial processes, which are manifold by definition and carry their own patently economic logic in this evolution: Shakespeare's aesthetic value and authorial reputation were inextricably intertwined with the commercial value of his name, his poems, and his plays in print (27). Hooks points to-we could even say condemns-an account founded on the relationship between and the book trade, not always in keeping with hard facts and characterized by certain unproven inferences or assumptions stemming from the powerful influence exerted first by the figure of William and his huge subsequent literary destiny and second by the fervor surrounding the First Folio of 1623, often presented as the outcome of stationers' endeavors at the time.Based on this statement of principles, and following in the critical tradition of recent contributions by Lukas Erne (Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2003; and the Book Trade, 2013) and Andrew Murphy (Shakespeare in Print, 2003), Hooks's cleansing function entailed conducting an in-depth review of large body of known information, casting doubt on or, at the very least, casting shadow over certain claims deemed as true. He is thus breaking the vicious circle that, in his view, has been forged between biography and bibliography, in which the latter shores up an account based on the former. Indeed, he manages precisely this, in an exercise shrouded in nuances. Accordingly, on the matter as to whether strived to become published author-as Erne has maintained-after careful examination of the data at hand, he points out the lack of evidence for this; quite the opposite in fact: Shakespeare, or rather, the various versions of in print, were created and circulated by commercial networks whose motives were independent of any he may have had (27). Even in the introduction, he conducts an excellent analysis of the possible motivations underlying the 1622 edition of Othello by Thomas Walkley. It has conventionally been noted that this publication indicated that Shakespeare already benefited from authorial reputation: the First Folio was already in process, and Walkley would merely have forestalled this print. On the other hand, Hooks diverts our attention from the authorial figure and the great collection of 1623 to highlight the target readerships of this stationer during the 1620s: the Westminster elite, absorbed by political affairs. …

Teaching Children How to LearnTell it Again! The Storytelling Handbook for Primary English Language Teachers

This double review looks at two recent publications co-written by Gail Ellis. The first is Teaching Children How to Learn from 2015, which she has written with Nayr Ibrahim, and the second is Tell it Again! The Storytelling Handbook for Primary English Language Teachers, published in 2014, and co-authored with Jean Brewster. Tell it Again! is now in its third edition and is, this time, published by British Council, with a slightly modified title and minor changes in content from the second edition, published by Penguin English in 2002 (the original in 1991). Given the books’ common author and similar time of publication, it seems logical to look at the two together. Initially, I will give a detailed review of and thoughts on the books separately; then, I will seek to highlight some of the differences and similarities between the two titles, thinking about their underlying theoretical ideas and principles as well as their target readership.

Representations of the dead and the afterlife in translations of Mudan Ting, a masterpiece in Chinese Kunqu theatre

The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the strategies used to translate into English death related cultural taboos viz. death, ghost and resurrection represented in the prominent classical Chinese drama Mudan Ting. Particular reference is made to the articulation of these taboos in three seminal English versions of Mudan Ting (as Peony Pavilion) by Cyril Birch, Wang Rongpei and Zhang Guanqian, respectively. Although these translators all follow the source text closely, certain differences in their translation strategies warrant attention. Cyril Birch takes an acculturation approach to the translation of death-related material, whereas Wang Rongpei adheres to the original text and tends to use semantic translation. In contrast, Zhang Guanqian usually translates literally, infusing the English text with a “foreign” flavor. These differences are examined in light of the general propensity among translators to take an avoidance approach to death-related material. The strategies used to translate taboo subjects are found to depend on the translator’s intentions, the target readership, the specific nature of the culturally loaded elements and the availability of equivalent expressions in the target language and culture.

Into Bhasha and English: Comparative Study of Bhasha and English Translation in India

Abstract The paper explores the various aspects of the translation process in India, by comparing regional language and English translations of three particular regional language works, using the Malayalam and English translations of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyaya's Bangla novel Arogyaniketan, U.R. Anantha Murthy's Kannada novel Samskara, and V.S. Khandekar's Marathi novel Yayati. The obvious fluency of a bhasha translation as compared to the English translation, I argue, point to the cultural filiation shared by Indian bhasha works despite their linguistic differences. The English translator in India faces the predicament of having a target language with no cohesive target readership. In fact, without a clear idea of who she is translating for, the English translator is forced to smoothen out the vexatious cultural aspects, which resist being carried over completely across borders. On the other hand, interlingual translation between the regional languages in India is more of an intracultural than an intercultural transference, which leads to less self-conscious translations. Contrary to Lawrence Venuti's argument that ethnocentric violence is the price you pay for fluency, the bhasha translations appear to be more sensitive to cultural nuances than the English ones with all their foreignizing devices of extensive notes and glossary.

Cross-Cultural Variation in the Use of Hedges and Boosters in Academic Discourse

AbstractHedges and boosters are important metadiscoursal devices contributing to the construal of persuasion in academic discourse as they enable academic writers to distinguish facts from opinions, evaluate the views of others and convey a different degree of commitment to their assertions (cf. Hyland 1998a, Hyland 2004, 2005). This study explores cross-cultural variation in the use of lexical hedges and boosters in the academic discourse of non-native writers. The study is carried out on a specialized corpus of linguistics research articles published in the international journal Applied Linguistics and the national Czech English-medium journal Discourse and Interaction. The main purpose of the cross-cultural investigation is to analyze variation in the rate, distribution and choice of hedges and boosters across the rhetorical structure of research articles in order to shed light on ways in which Anglophone and Czech writers express different degrees of commitment in their assertions when striving to persuade their target readership to accept their views and claims.

Howdunnit? The French translation of Australian cultural identity in Philip McLaren’s crime novel Scream Black Murder/Tueur d’Aborigènes

ABSTRACTWith the growing acceptance by scholars that crime fiction narratives can serve as a vehicle for authors to construct a sense of ‘self-identification’, the possibility emerges for ‘home-grown’ crime fiction texts to be harnessed by authors to evoke particular national traditions and identities. Together with the recognition by translation theorists that literary translation has the ability to perform a culture for a new target readership, this has led to intense debate surrounding the difficulties posed by the translation of cultural specificities and the possible effects that chosen translation strategies may have on perceptions of the source culture for the new target readership. This article forms part of a larger project that examines what happens to the culturally specific features of Australian crime fiction novels produced and published in the last 30 years when they are translated into French for consumption by the francophone world. It will take as a case study a crime fiction novel by Australian Aboriginal author Philip McLaren, Scream Black Murder/Tueur d’Aborigènes, in which the author has consciously set out to construct a distinctive sense of Australian cultural identity and difference.

Erasmus’s Translation of the New Testament: Aim and Method

Erasmus’s main aim in making his new translation of the New Testament was to present the writings of the apostles and evangelists in better, more classical Latin than that of the Vulgate. He believed that the new age of renaissance and humanism demanded a new translation of the Bible in Latin and that its language must be adapted to the criteria of classical Latin. His translation was neither meant to replace the Vulgate, nor to be used by everybody; its target readership was primarily theologians, who could use it as a study Bible. In his translation, Erasmus wanted to correct textual corruption and translation errors that had crept into the Vulgate. He also wanted to render the Greek in a clearer, purer, and more expressive language, but most of all in a grammatically and syntactically more correct Latin. He rejected the idea that each word in the original text must be matched by a word in the translation: the idiom of the target language is the first requirement of a good translation. Not words, but meanings must be rendered. More generally, Erasmus wanted his translation to serve the spreading of the “wisdom of Christ”: it was to serve the reform of church and society and the spiritual and moral renewal of Europe.

Hypotheses on the Diachronic Development of the Akan Language Group1

There is controversy over the use of the term Akan by reason of the fact that it has both linguistic and ethnographic semantic readings. Not all the Akan people speak the Akan language and not all those who speak Akan as mother tongue can be technically classified as Akan people since some of their cultural practices deviate from that which sets the Akan people apart from other ethnic groups in Ghana and the West African sub-region in general. Hence, we begin this paper by telling between the ethnographic Akan and linguistic Akan in the cause of educating the target readership about who the speakers of the Akan language are and/or are not. We also establish seven vowels as constituents of the * Proto-Akan vocalic inventory. This study is mainly based on evidence from the Akan synchronic phonology in respect of selected varieties of that language group which unquestionably represent all the varieties of the language group including those that are not mentioned in this study. We have asserted that *Proto-Akan had thirteen consonants in its segmental catalogue and also provided pieces of evidence from both synchronic Akan and English lexemes borrowed into the Akan Language Group to give credence to our hypothesis that all consonants apart from the 13 * proto ones developed into the language group through miscellaneous phonological processes. All analytical discussions in this paper have been done within the theories of comparative method and internal reconstruction.

Bibliometric indicators in the context of regional repositories: proposing the D-index

In collaboration with the managers of a university, we have conducted an action research to gauge the adequacy of texts written by researchers in the doctoral programs of the institution as the input (content) for the university's distance learning program. For the analyses, bibliometric data were collected regarding the articles in question from the regional SciELO repository. This repository was chosen because the articles are mostly published in Portuguese, which is in the domain of the target readership of the distance learning project. It was observed that there was a need for an indicator that related the number of downloads of an article to the total number of downloads of the journal in which it was published. Thus, we propose the D-index, defined as the number of papers with download number ?d, as a useful index for characterizing the academic popularity (hits) of a journal. The first applications of the D-index in terms of professional practice were positive, given its usefulness and practicality. The D-index aids the analysis of the download of an article, which is a fundamental event for subsequent reading, internalization and learning. An analysis of this set of actions is essential to the context of regional repositories, as their mission also includes the dissemination of information to aid the learning and education of their readers.

The well-being of laboratory non-human primates.

The well-being of non-human primates in captivity is of joint concern to scientists, veterinarians, colony managers, caretakers, and researchers working with non-human primates in biomedical research. With increased regulatory, accreditation, and research focus on optimizing the use of social housing for laboratory primates, as well as the advent of techniques to assess indices of chronic stress and related measures of well-being, there is no better time to present the most current advances in the field of non-human primate behavioral management. The collective body of research presented here was inspired in part by a 2014 symposium entitled, "Chronic Hormones and Demographic Variables: Center-Wide Studies on Non-Human Primate Well-Being" held at the American Society of Primatologists' 37th Annual Meeting in Decatur, GA. By aiming to target readership with scientific and/or management oversight of captive primate behavioral management programs, this special issue provides badly-needed guidance for implementing social housing programs in a research environment and leverages collaboration across multiple facilities to address key components of behavioral management, explore refinements in how well-being can be measured, and identify the interrelationships between varying indices. Am. J. Primatol. 79:e22520, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Considerations of relevance to the target reader in Korean into English translation

This paper looks at the considerations of target reader in Korean into English translation tasks involving culture-specific lexis (CSL) in relation to the notion of relevance in translation. It draws on findings from a pilot study which was conducted on five students learning Korean into English translation. A teaching session which placed emphasis on optimal relevance in translation and the translation of implicit information was held, and pre and post tasks and interviews were conducted. Recorded data was transcribed and coded using NVivo software. When translators translate a text, they have an imagined or implied target reader for whom they are translating the text. The translation of CSL requires communicative interaction between the translator and intended target reader. Translators need to consider how to convey CSL in an optimally relevant way. This is particularly important for those dealing with language pairs which are significantly different from each other, such as Korean and English. Results show a significant difference in consideration of the target reader in Sessions 1 and 3 (pre and post tasks), which indicates that it is highly likely that such considerations were reinforced during Session 2 (teaching session). Presenting qualitative excerpts from the data, the current paper highlights the important role CSL can play in developing learners’ considerations of target readership.

Heavy-Tailed Distributions: Data, Diagnostics, and New Developments

This monograph is written for the numerate nonspecialist, and hopes to serve three purposes. First it gathers mathematical material from diverse but related fields of order statistics, records, extreme value theory, majorization, regular variation and subexponentiality. All of these are relevant for understanding fat tails, but they are not, to our knowledge, brought together in a single source for the target readership. Proofs that give insight are included, but for fussy calculations the reader is referred to the excellent sources referenced in the text. Multivariate extremes are not treated. This allows us to present material spread over hundreds of pages in specialist texts in twenty pages. Chapter 5 develops new material on heavy tail diagnostics and gives more mathematical detail. Second, it presents a new measure of obesity. The most popular definitions in terms of regular variation and subexponentiality invoke putative properties that hold at infinity, and this complicates any empirical estimate. Each definition captures some but not all of the intuitions associated with tail heaviness. Chapter 5 studies two candidate indices of tail heaviness based on the tendency of the mean excess plot to collapse as data are aggregated. The probability that the largest value is more than twice the second largest has intuitive appeal but its estimator has very poor accuracy. The Obesity index is defined for a positive random variable X as: Ob(X) = P (X1 + X4 > X2 + X3|X1 ≤ X2 ≤ X3 ≤ X4), Xi independent copies of X. For empirical distributions, obesity is defined by bootstrapping. This index reasonably captures intuitions of tail heaviness. Among its properties, if α > 1 then Ob(X) < Ob(X). However, it does not completely mimic the tail index of regularly varying distributions, or the extreme value index. A Weibull distribution with shape 1/4 is more obese than a Pareto distribution with tail index 1, even though this Pareto has infinite mean and the Weibull’s moments are all finite. Chapter 5 explores properties of the Obesity index. Third and most important, we hope to convince the reader that fat tail phenomena pose real problems; they are really out there and they seriously challenge our usual ways of thinking about historical averages, outliers, trends, regression coefficients and confidence bounds among many other things. Data on flood insurance claims, crop loss claims, hospital discharge bills, precipitation and damages and fatalities from natural catastrophes drive this point home.

Exploring Chinese Experimental Literary Translation: Translation of Latin American Magic Realism into Modern Chinese

The main purpose of this paper is to develop useful empirical research methods to advance the understanding of experimental Chinese literary translation. This will be based on an empirical corpus-based study of two modern Chinese versions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The case study reveals that in translating linguistic events, textual features and cultural phenomena that are unknown to the target audience, for example, magical realism, into Chinese, translators may adopt a range of translation strategies and tactics that lead to significant differences between the genre of the translation and the corresponding genre in the target language. New linguistic expressions and writing techniques introduced by experimental literary translation will either be normalised by existing writing conventions or be accepted by the target readership which in turn will expand and enrich the target language and cultural system.

A bibliometric analysis of privacy and ethics in IEEE Security and Privacy

The increasingly ubiquitous use of technology has led to the concomitant rise of intensified data collection and the ethical issues associated with the privacy and security of that data. In order to address the question of how these ethical concerns are discussed in the literature surrounding the subject, we examined articles published in IEEE Security and Privacy, a magazine targeted towards a general, technically-oriented readership spanning both academia and industry. Our investigation of the intersection between the ethical and technological dimensions of privacy and security is structured as a bibliometric analysis. Our dataset covers all articles published in IEEE Security and Privacy since its inception in 2003 to February 06, 2014 . This venue was chosen not only because of its target readership, but also because a preliminary search of keywords related to ethics, privacy, and security topics in the ISI Web of Knowledge and IEEE Xplore indicated that IEEE Security and Privacy has published a preponderance of articles matching those topics. In fact, our search returned two-fold more articles for IEEE Security and Privacy than the next most prolific venue. These reasons, coupled with the fact that both academia and industry are well-represented in the authorship of articles makes IEEE Security and Privacy an excellent candidate for bibliometric analysis. Our analysis examines the ways articles in IEEE Security and Privacy relate ethics to information technology. Such articles can influence the development of law, policy and the future of information technology ethics. We employed thematic and JK-biplot analyses of content relating privacy and ethics and found eight dominant themes as well as the inter-theme relationships. Authors and institutional affiliations were examined to discern whether centers of research activity and/or authors dominated the overall field or thematic areas. Results suggest avenues for future work in critical areas, especially for closing present gaps in the coverage of ethics and information technology privacy and security themes particularly in the areas of ethics and privacy awareness.

‘How the Modern Girl Attains Strength and Grace’: the Girl's Own Paper, sport and the discipline of the female body, 1914–1956

In the first half of the twentieth century there was a great deal of debate about increasing female participation in sporting activities, and changes to the female sporting body and the way in which it was displayed. Magazines for girls played a key role in the construction of the female body, and in mediating for their readers a range of diverse views on the meaning, purpose and benefits or dangers of female physical culture. This article explores the way in which one periodical, the Girl's Own Paper (GOP), disseminated those discourses and allowed its readers to explore different viewpoints. It argues that the way in which GOP presented sport for girls and women was contingent upon the age of the intended readership, and that the coverage of sport within the paper reached a peak in the 1930s when the target readership was aged 12 to 16.