Cultural Texts Research Articles

AFANASY FET IN THE MODERN DIGITAL SPACE (using the example of Internet folklore)

The article deals with analysis of the functioning of cultural texts in the digital space associated with the name of one of the iconic Russian lyrics of the 2nd half of the 19th century, poet Afanasy Fet. The area of the network space represented by Internet folklore, is being studied. The objective of the work was to determine the degree of demand and analyse the forms of representation of notions about the poet’s life and work in network folklore. Various forms of Internet presentemes (memes, demotivators, cartoons, comics), samples of Russian online poetry – “mindless” and “depressive” rhymes (poroshki and depressyashki respectively), jokes, as well as techniques, by which Fet’s content is included in Internet communication, were analysed. As a result of the study, it was found that Internet folklore actively uses the language game with the poet’s surname through metanalysis, namely: false etymological reinterpretation, expressive derivation, rebus. Three winged units from Afanasy Fet’s poems are in demand in Internet communication: ‟Do not wake her at dawn”, ‟I have come to you with greetings”, ‟to embrace and cry”. The latter has not been fixed in dictionaries and reference books yet, but is of active use in the network space as a stable and reproducible unit. Afanasy Fet’s winged phrases are included in Internet presentemes in original and transformed forms, as well as played with in net-poetry using the form of pastiche.

‘So much for the prattling of sages’: D&D gaming paratexts, Fan(nish) distribution of knowledge, and Drow

This article investigates gaming paratexts related to the popular tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as heuristics. Gaming paratexts are accessible communication and media artifacts that influence what new players learn about games as cultural and ludic texts. In this work we examine ‘official' and ‘unofficial' gaming paratexts about drow, D&D’s dark elves. We highlight authorship, circulation, and accessibility as key impact factors, then identify common themes such as insider knowledge, transmission of expertise, and knowledge acquisition. This analysis reveals how – beyond information about the game itself – gaming paratexts can lead players to receive biased or incomplete impressions of issues with D&D, such as racism within the game system. We find that this specific form of online discourse about TTRPGs influences popular conceptions about D&D and often parallels forms of fannish practise through its affective connections, citational politics, and modal variety.

Popular Cultural Texts (Film, Tv Shows) in Shaping Language Learners' Identities and Attitudes Towards the Target Language Culture: an Approach to Advancing SDG 4 - Quality Education

Objective: This study is to investigate the ways in which popular culture texts (film, television shows) shape language learners’ identities and attitudes towards the target language culture. The study aims to explore how movies and television shows influence and shape language learners' identities and attitudes toward the target culture. Theoretical Framework: The main concepts and theories are based on Geert Hofstede’s Onion Culture Model. This model provides a solid basis for understanding the context of the investigation. Methods: This study uses a qualitative research approach, using secondary content analysis to build a model of learners’ attitudes and identities, and then presents the results obtained from the analysis of this model. Results and Discussion: The findings indicate that target cultural values have a significant impact on learners’ attitudes, resulting in both favorable and unfavorable impacts on cultural immersion. These findings highlight the important role of popular culture texts in motivating language learners and shaping their attitudes and identities. Research implications: This study investigates the influence of films as well as television shows on culturally relevant foreign language teaching and learning activities. Popular culture texts play a crucial role in promoting cultural awareness and molding the attitudes and identities of learners. It contributes to revealing an approach to advancing SDG 4—Quality Education. Originality/Value: The study confirms that popular culture materials in language instruction can enhance learners’ cultural awareness and the overall language acquisition process. This study also demonstrates the use of popular culture texts in shaping language learners’ cultural and identity.

Students in the third space: constructions of knowledge of foreign law in legal translations from German into Danish

In this paper, I want to investigate the variations in the translations produced by a group of students translating the same source text. The aim of the study is to investigate the degree to which it is possible to empirically find traces of Third Space characteristics of legal translation of court decisions between Danish and German. A corpus of 22 translations is investigated for patterns followed by the students, with a special view to assessing the degree to which they choose similar renderings of the source text elements. A central result of the empirical study is that there is a considerable degree of variation across the studied translation students and that a general distinction between strategies guarding source text complexity in content and form, on the one hand, and strategies making the rendering of the source text in the target text culture more accessible for target text readers.

Cultural dialogism in the dissemination of culinary knowledge: a comparative analysis of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese and Chinese Gastronomy

ABSTRACT The dissemination of culinary knowledge is achieved mainly via cookbooks. It is no exception that Chinese culinary knowledge reaches international audience via cookbooks penned by Chinese diasporas. This research makes a comparison of two Chinese cookbooks to approach how they achieve cultural dialogism in their introduction of Chinese culinary knowledge into the English world. To elucidate this major statement, dual aspects are expounded, namely, the way to reconstruct Chinese culinary knowledge system and the methods to translate Chinese culinary terms. In this discussion, Chinese and English culinary knowledge systems are taken as cultural others to each other. The diasporic authors of the two cookbooks, with flexible cultural standpoints either as an insider or an outsider of Chinese and English culinary cultures, enhance cultural dialogism between heterogenous cookery traditions and practices. It is concluded that cookbooks are among the diverse cultural texts of (Chinese) diasporas, whose social functions go far beyond transferring culinary knowledge or establishing the authors’ identity in an exotic context. Rather, they serve as a “tasty tool-kit” to promote cross-continental communication and intercultural dialogues.

ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ කඳුකර සිංහල මානව සංස්කෘතිය කොළොන්න කෝරළයේ කඳුකර ගම්මාන ආශ්‍රිත ප්‍රදේශීය භාෂාව මත සිදු කරන ලද සංකල්පීයකරණ අධ්‍යයනයක් Sinhalese Hill Culture in Sri Lanka: A Conceptual Study of the Regional Language in Hill Areas of Kolonna Korala

There is a unique cultural significance and identity in the cultural life of the Sinhalese villagers who reside in hill areas of Sabaragamuwa, Uwa and Central provinces. It was observed that this hill culture is different from the Sri Lankan established village. Hill country Sinhalese are entwined with the geographical hill area economically, socially, religiously, agriculturally and politically. Hill country and humans are interconnected with cultural values and factors. This study attempts to study the regional language of hill country culture and introduce it to Sri Lankan academic discourse. It is proposed to explore hill country community as a social structure different from traditional village community. The objective of the study was to identify the cultural identity of hill country community and propose the cultural and theoretical foundation which is necessary to understand their social, economic political and religious needs. This is a qualitative research study conducted using inductive method. Sri Lankan village is recognized with the 'lake, stupa, village, temple' concept. It is the main concept with reference to village in cultural discourse. It was conceptualized by this language study that a hill country village culture was developed in relation to hill country and Sabaragamu hills from a long time. By differentiating this hill country human culture as a new social set, a novel village cultural text could be introduced to Sri Lankan society.

Intersemiotic Translations of Greek Popular Films in the Film Industry and Media

Abstract This paper examines cultural texts and their place in the Greek semiosphere. More particularly, it delves into intersemiotic translations or adaptations or remakes of masterpieces of, the so-called, Golden Age of Greek cinema, which are deeply engraved in the Greek collective cultural memory. These cultural texts assume yet further value many decades after they were created, through three semiotic choices involving a translational dimension: their colourisation, their cinematic adaptation, and their amateur remakes hosted on social media and other internet sites. Assuming that the original texts are located at the centre of the Greek semiosphere, this study aims to show whether these new texts, the metatexts, are placed next to their originals or whether they coexist along the periphery or near the borders of the Greek semiosphere, an element that will determine the extent to which they will be accepted by contemporary Greeks. The study shows that the popularity of new cultural texts, which belong to the comedy genre, is increasing due to the desire of film audiences to participate through these intersemiotic translations (metatexts) in the popularity of the original cultural texts (prototexts) that are considered cultural myths.

Enhancing Translation Education Through Augmented Reality (AR)

This empirical study explores the deployment and effects of Augmented Reality (AR) in translation education, emphasizing its significant impact on student engagement, motivation, and accuracy across diverse text genres. Conducted over a 16-week period, our research utilizes a mixed-methods approach to assess AR's efficacy, especially in high-precision fields such as medical and technical translations, and its utility in literary and cultural texts. Findings demonstrate marked improvements in translation speed and efficiency with AR, coupled with enhanced accuracy and greater contextual comprehension.

Consistency Verification Method of Chinese and Russian Traditional Culture Translation Text Corpus Based on CNN-BiGRU

China and Russia have completely different cultural backgrounds, historical traditions and ways of thinking, which makes it difficult to directly correspond or accurately convey many culturally unique concepts, customs and expressions during the translation process. For example, some idioms, sayings or cultural symbols may have completely different meanings or no equivalents in the two cultures. Therefore, there are problems such as poor verification resulting in the consistency verification of Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus. In order to solve this problem, this paper designs a consistency verification method for Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus based on CNN-BiGRU. Through the part-of-speech correspondence of the Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus, it is represented by vectors, the feature weights of the Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus are calculated, the collocation information between the feature items is determined, and the maximum likelihood of the features is calculated using data smoothing technology. The rules are adjusted to extract the characteristics of the Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus. Preprocess the key feature source documents of each Chinese and Russian traditional culture external publicity translation text corpus, determine the source documents and their corresponding key features of the traditional culture external publicity translation text corpus, and use TF-IDF and IDF to calculate the key feature sources of the corpus. Based on the rarity of document data, the BERT model is introduced as an encoder to determine the key features of the Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus, integrating the CNN-BiGRU algorithm to design a consistency verification algorithm for Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus. Set up the convolution layer, weight sharing layer, pooling layer, and BiGRU verification layer to build a CNN-BiGRU model to achieve consistency verification of the Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus. Experimental results show that this method can improve the consistency verification effect of Chinese and Russian traditional cultural external publicity translation text corpus.

РОЛЬ ХУДОЖНЬОГО ПЕРЕКЛАДУ У ФОРМУВАННІ ЛІТЕРАТУРНО-КУЛЬТУРНОГО ПРОСТОРУ І КОНСТРУЮВАННІ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ ІДЕНТИЧНОСТІ

The article analyses the role of literary translation in the shaping of literary and cultural space and construction of national identity. The research is carried out in line with the Cultural Studies approach in Translation Studies, according to which literary translation is interpreted not as a purely linguistic phenomenon, but primarily as a refl ection of a cultural tradition, a kind of projection of events of historical, nation-building and nationwide dimensions. In particular, the author explains the need to rethink certain concepts and methodological approaches in Translation Studies due to the dynamic interpretation of borders and rethinking of the concept of identity. An attempt is made to identify the essential aspects of literary translation as a form of interliterary interaction and intercultural communication. The paper illustrates the distinction of the nation-building function of literary translation in Ukrainian Translation Studies. The interrelationships between literary translation, culture and national identity are established. The polysphere model of cultural space is outlined. Varieties of national identity are considered. The author characterizes literary translation as an important practice of forming a national cultural space as a process of creation, dissemination and consumption of such cultural texts as translated literature. Translators are participants in intercultural communication, they create translations and facilitate their dissemination and reception in various public spheres from the global to the niche levels around various generating centres. A cultural centre-generator whose identity is in line with the national identity of the country and which makes deliberate eff orts to ensure that its discursive identity is shared by the entire public sphere contributes to the formation and strengthening of the national identity of its audience. The problem of the unity and integrity of the national cultural space is caused by the cultural compatibility of all its public spheres, an important factor of which is the use of language as a cultural code. The spread of electronic global communication and the growing trend towards the use of a global language reduces the presence of the national language in the global communication space, which leads to the levelling of national identities. In such circumstances, highquality translation will help preserve the national identity of the cultural space. Key words: literary translation, interliterary interaction, intercultural communication, translation function, literary and cultural space, national identity, model of cultural space.

Gender Roles in Traditional and Modern Minangkabau Kaba: An Analysis of Ten Selected Narratives

This research aims to investigate how gender roles are portrayed in Minangkabau kaba, which are traditional folktales from West Sumatra, Indonesia. The study investigates how gender norms are portrayed, perpetuated, and questioned within these cultural texts by qualitatively analyzing ten chosen kaba. These kaba include both traditional and contemporary storylines. This research uses structuralist and semiotic techniques to analyze themes, character roles, and symbolic representations associated with gender. The results of the study demonstrate that there has been a substantial change in the depiction of gender roles from the traditional to the contemporary kaba. Modern kaba, on the other hand, challenges these stereotypes by showing women in important roles who are empowered, in contrast to conventional tales, which often support preexisting gender standards. This study contributes to the knowledge of how folklore reflects and changes social values. It also provides insights into the dynamic interaction between cultural narratives and the debate on gender equality in Minangkabau culture.

“Greater than fear”: theorizing affective blockage in social movement rhetoric

ABSTRACT Created by street artist Shepard Fairey, the protest poster, “We the People are Greater than Fear,” emerged as a powerful visual response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Though celebrated as a progressive symbol of inclusion, we argue the poster, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces some of the very prejudices it seeks to confront by associating Muslimness with suspicion, foreignness, and fear. Using “Greater than Fear” as a case study, this essay contributes to scholarship combining critical affect theory with rhetorical studies by theorizing affective blockage as a means of understanding the ways affect contributes to the resilience of hegemonic narratives by preventing certain meanings from surfacing. We argue the poster reveals a cautionary lesson about how affect can obscure critique of cultural texts created with progressive intent, inadvertently bolstering softer, more subtle forms of racism embedded in liberal contexts. We also discuss the importance of interrogating rehearsed affective associations that, by virtue of their familiarity, seem normal and acceptable but ultimately reinforce exploitative conceptions related to identity categories such as race, religion, sexuality, class, and gender. We conclude with insights for rhetorical scholars about how affective associations can enable ostensibly liberal discourses while at the same time preventing their critique.

Implicit cultural policies in Zimbabwe: insights from Stephen Joel Chifunyise’s plays and theatre

Sometimes cultural policies are dismissed and criticized by some artists and cultural practitioners as banal and other times they are deemed pivotal in the democratization of culture, cultural democracy and the advancement of a democratic society. This ambivalent perception of arts and cultural policies results in many missed opportunities in the production and distribution of cultural and creative expressions like plays and theatre. This paper sets out to answer the question about how cultural policies shape the advancement of cultural and creative expressions in post-independence Zimbabwe. Stephen Joel Chifunyise’s plays and theatre as case examples provide insightful snippets of the role and power of cultural policies in the advancement of the cultural and creative sector and the broader society. This is achieved through a review of academic publications, policy documents and cultural policy texts. The theoretical lens partially deployed here is interpretive policy analysis, which reads the meaning of cultural policies through authored and constructed policy texts such as plays, theatre productions, theatre infrastructure, theatre festivals, publishing houses, book fairs, policy documents and public pronouncements. In addition to the interpretive policy analysis, I also deploy the concept of explicit and implicit cultural policies to comprehensively look at the role of direct cultural policies and indirect cultural policies in the theatre sector in Zimbabwe. The second lens is used to analyse the impact of Zimbabwean implicit and explicit cultural policies on the theatre sector through Chifunyise’s plays and theatre. In critically answering the central question, this paper argues that Zimbabwe has several implicit cultural policies whose effect on the theatre is felt more through constructed cultural policy texts than authored cultural policy texts, and thus, all cultural expressions are inevitably shaped by one cultural policy or the other.

Images of Russians in the Japanese pop culture (on the example of anime)

The article seeks to identify and analyse the ways of depicting Russians in the contemporary Japanese pop cultural texts. The following anime series were chosen as the object of the study: Black Lagoon; Darker than Black: Gemini of the Meteor; Hetalia Axis Powers; Bungou Stray Dogs; Yuri!!! on Ice; How Heavy are The Dumbbells You Lift?. The author of the article considers different stereotypes related to Russia and its inhabitants, and also covers such issues as age and gender, appearance and language, lifestyle and character traits of the Russian characters.

Caribbean Confederations as Relationalities

In this essay, I connect my work on Archipelago studies with Édouard Glissant’s notions of relationality and Caribbean confederations to formulate what I denominate as the erotics of archipelagic thinking. My main goal is to share my process of thinking with and through Glissant’s work to focus on a series of theoretical gestures that have allowed me to propose modes of reading literary depictions of Caribbean con/federations that go beyond the binary opposition between colonialism and nationalism. I am performing an exercise that I assign to my students when I teach the “Introduction to Critical Theory” course at the University of Miami. Instead of writing an essay with a short theoretical introduction followed by a detailed close reading of literary and cultural texts that illustrate a keyword or a theoretical insight, I conduct a methodological meditation in which I theorize the archipelagic as a form of relationality that configures an erotic imaginary beyond the nuclear family and towards affective networks. To think about the Caribbean as an archipelagic formation, I use my comparative work on the Antillean Confederation in the Hispanic Caribbean (1860-1898) and the West Indies Federation in the English Caribbean (1958-1962) as a historical context in which the region congealed as a network of locations “act[ing] in concert."

Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction: Relational harm and the child as witness

Through close reading of medical and cultural texts, this article demonstrates how the narrativisation of relational harm underpinned the emerging categorisation of ‘addiction’ in the 19th century: excessive consumption was conceived through its detrimental impact upon others, and more specifically, upon the family. The problem was portrayed as physiological, psychological, and social: ‘addiction’ could not be located securely within a single individual, nor was it conceived simply as a social vice. While other societal themes emerge in the medical writing of the period, such as the relationship between drinking and criminality, and the visibility of drinking in the working-classes, these are not presented as proto-diagnostic criteria in the same way as relational harm. In theorising addiction, medicine relied upon rhetorical devices and narrative modes, and authors and artists took an active role in defining the terms of the debate around drinking, drug use, and gambling. Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank represent childhood through the adult's compulsive behaviour, which the child witnesses, while the adult's behaviour itself is conceived as harm directed towards child. The article demonstrates how 21st-century attitudes, particularly located in the fields of psychiatric diagnosis and child protection social work, echo debates established by 19th-century narratives, arguing that that the disease model of addiction was closely associated with the medico-legal production of childhood. Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction therefore anticipate late 20th- and 21st-century attitudes regarding the impact of parental substance use upon children.

An Introduction to the Difficulties in Translating Sacred Texts

Religious translation contributes significantly to the development of translation as a subject. In the field of religious translation, the most frequently translated documents are sacred texts since sacred texts are central to a religion. However, due to complicated and sensitive cultural elements sacred texts contain, the translating processes of any sacred texts are filled with difficulties. To produce more adequate translation of sacred texts, the potential difficulties are ought to be studied and understood. This article will introduce the major difficulties in translating sacred texts and, briefly discuss current methods utilized in sacred text translation, and provide suggestions. Contents will be provided in the following order: reasons for translating sacred texts (introduction), linguistic difficulties in the sacred text translation, religious issues in the sacred text translation, current translation method of the sacred text, and conclusion with suggestions on the potential methods of sacred text translation depending on a translation’s target audiences.

Подходы к изучению текстов культуры в работах В. В. Нарциссова

The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of perception of cultural texts by V. V. Narcissov, a prominent art historian, staff member of the House-Museum of P. D. Korin, lecturer whose approach helped to form several generations of scholars in the field of Russian culture and medieval Christian culture. The scientific novelty of the work is derived from the analysis of relevant biographic and academic papers on art history. Biographic material helped to identify the characteristics of the culture of Moscow intelligentsia in the second half of the 20th century. Papers on art history were central in uncovering the author’s approach to monument study. Likewise, general artistic principles of fine art have been considered. As a result of the conducted research, through consideration of the available scientific papers by V. V. Narcissov on Russian art it became possible to note specific research approaches and the overall continuity in the Russian art history tradition during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Okruchy egzystencji na płótnie i na papierze. O spotkaniach z trzema obrazami Caravaggia oraz innych polonistycznych inspiracjach

The article reflects on the essence of contemporary humanities in the educational dimension and emphasizes the importance of multidimensional dialogue based on four pillars: relationships, empathy, critical thinking and cultural context. Referring to Olga Tokarczuk’s category of a sensitive narrator, the author of the study postulates the need to educate a sensitive reader and viewer, as well as paying special attention to empathetic education. She presents the topos of homo viator as an anthropological category and in the context of three paintings by Caravaggio: Basket of Fruit, The Burial of Saint Lucy and The Raising of Lazarus, as well as a short story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz titled The Maidens of Wilko considers various types of journeys that people experience in life, stressing in particular the existential dimension of the human life. The author emphasizes the value of knowing the biographical context in the process of interpreting the proposed cultural texts, as well as proposes specific methodological solutions for working with the discussed cultural texts.

Wisława Szymborska – trzy studia anatomiczne

The article is of an interpretive and methodological nature and concerns the design of reflections around existential and universal issues of “longue durée” (Braudel), as well as the design of situations of reception of cultural texts within the framework of humanities education at the high school level. The author describes a project – implemented in practice – related to the phenomenon of human existence and the diagnosis of human condition, primarily based on Wisława Szymborska’s poems, including three poetic “anatomical studies”, with literature treated here as a “laboratory of thought experiments” (Ricoeur). The principles of text selection and arrangement are explained using this example, with particular attention paid to the various materials available on the Internet.