Text Level Research Articles

A Consecutive Interpreting Study of the Keynote Speech on the Opening Ceremony of the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations

As a real-time bilingual processing activity, consecutive interpreting consists of three stages:source language listening and identification, information memorization and target language production. This paper chooses the consecutive interpreting recording of keynote speech on the opening ceremony of the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations as the study text. The author manage to analysis the target language text from lexical level, syntactic level and textual level.

Kritik Pemerintah Pada Lagu “Gugatan Rakyat Semesta” Karya Feast (Analisis Wacana Kritis Model Norman Fairclough)

This research aims to examine the role of songs as a tool of criticism against the government, focusing on "Gugatan Rakyat Semesta" which calls for scrutiny of governance. The study employs Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis approach with textual, discursive, and sociocultural analyses to understand how the song reflects socio-political dynamics in Indonesia. At the textual level, the research indicates that the song explicitly or implicitly urges people to challenge the government. Discursively, there is a correlation between the release of the song and student demonstrations. Sociocultural analysis reveals that the song's release is influenced by social tensions arising from economic decline, unemployment, corruption, discourse on election postponement, and others. This research is expected to contribute to understanding how musical artworks, particularly songs, can serve as tools of critique in the Indonesian socio-political context.

Deliberate Starvation: Hunger Artists in Kafka, Różewicz, and Sinking Ship

How can a negative action, the decision to abstain from food, be enacted on stage? Examining hunger as a conscious choice to avoid food for spectacle rather than an unwanted need arising from lack of basic nourishment, this article illustrates several ways to make hunger visible in performance. Through the critical lens of actor-network theory (ANT), hunger’s apparently scarce dramatic action is shown to be framed by and networked with the performance of several other human and non-human actors. Case studies chart a process of “translation” of the typical hunger artist performance from its historical examples to its contemporary theatre-within-the-theatre adaptations. In the West, self-inflicted starvation became a form of entertainment more distinctly in the late nineteenth century, when living skeletons and hunger artists were shown at circuses, fairs, and amusement parks, and produced income for themselves and their impresarios. Franz Kafka’s short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist,” 1922) looked back at the history of the profession, identifying the main components of the spectacle of hunger. Polish playwright Tadeusz Różewicz turned the short story into a play, Odejście głodomora (The Hunger Artist Departs, 1977), exploring the potential for dialogic interactions at the textual level and developing side-characters only implied by Kafka. By contrast, the contemporary NYC-based company Sinking Ship created A Hunger Artist (2017), an adaptation that expanded the short story’s theatricality around a single performer who plays multiple characters with the aid of all the resources of theatre, from puppets to audience members “enrolled” in the show.

‘Novelty’ through narrative and paratextual voice: The case of John Minford’s translation of ‘The laughing girl’

‘The Laughing Girl’ (‘Yingning’) is a short fictional story from Liaozhai zhiyi, a collection of uncanny and surreal stories written by the Chinese writer Pu Songling between the 1660s and 1720s. The stories have been made available for anglophone readers as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio published in 2006, canonised by Penguin Classics and the translator John Minford, whose approach rooted in ‘nouvelle Chinoiserie’ imbues the tales with a sense of novelty or strangeness, both textually and paratextually. In this study, we will investigate how Minford foregrounds the story’s novelty with his translator’s voice in the translated text. Comparison and analysis reveal that on the textual level, Minford’s shifting focalisation and narrative voice accentuates the strangeness in ‘The Laughing Girl’ and that his additions in terms of characterisation construct Yingning an even more outlandish fox spirit. On the paratextual level, he foregrounds the text’s novelty at the expense of other themes, such as the moral edification or social critique. Minford’s unique perspective on and approach to the source text align with the publisher’s aim to appeal to a general readership, leading him to highlight the text’s exoticism in his translation. Although Minford’s translation is both accessible and stylistically deft, it appears to reduce Strange Tales to a mere anthology of the bizarre and grotesque while constructing an ‘imagined and ethereal orient’, as is clearly indicated by the corpus-assisted readers’ reception analysis.

The Uses of the Discourse Marker Zen in Iraqi Arabic Oral Discourse: A Discourse- Pragmatic Analysis

This study examined the discourse-pragmatic functions the DM Zen performs at the interpersonal and textual levels of Iraqi Arabic oral discourse. It also explored whether there is a relationship between the speaker's gender or educational level and the use of the DM Zen from a functional viewpoint. Brinton’s (1996) dual model of functions was employed as a framework of analysis. The results revealed that beside Brinton's (1996) proposed macro- level functions, the DM Zen was found to fulfil extra micro-level functions at both levels of discourse. The results also showed that the speaker's gender and educational level had no effect on the usage of the speech marker Zen in terms of functions.

Assessing University Students’ Competence in Translating English Discourse Connectives into Kurdish

The present study sets out to assess university students’ competence in translating English discourse connectives into Kurdish. It also attempts to study the impact of teaching on students’ translation competence for rendering these elements. Discourse connectives are one of the main subcategories of textual metadiscourse elements which play a crucial role in text organization and the creation of cohesion. Their class is mainly comprised of conjunctions and adverbials which connect ideas at intrasentential, intersentential, and textual levels. Appropriate recognition, utilization, and translation of English discourse connectives are problematic and challenging for Kurdish EFL learners and translators. Moreover, some connectors are multifunctional and polysemous in nature. This paper aims at highlighting some of these translation problems and assessing students’ competence in their rendering at the pre-test and post-test. The research design is mixed method and employs a Translation Task and a Judgement Elicitation Task as two means for measuring translation competence. These tests were carried out on 40 Third-Year students at the Department of Translation, College of Languages, University of Duhok. The study concluded that students possessed enough translation competence for making judgements on the appropriate renditions of the discourse connectives. In contrast, they failed to appropriately translate besides, although, nevertheless, yet, provided that, otherwise, unless, for, thereby, and so that in the pre-test. Furthermore, holding teaching sessions on the classifications, functions, and translation of discourse connectives had a significant impact on the acquisition of translation competence in the post-test.

Purchase intentions in a chatbot environment: An examination of the effects of customer experience

Research background: Chatbots represent valuable technological tools that allow companies to improve customer experiences, meet their expectations in real time, and provide them with personalized assistance. They have contributed to the transformation of conventional customer service models into online solutions, offering accessibility and efficiency through their integration across various digital platforms. Nevertheless, the existing literature is limited in terms of exploring the potential of chatbots in business communication and studying their impact on the customer's response. Purpose of the article: The main objective of this study is to examine how consumers perceive chatbots as customer service devices. In particular, the paper aims to analyze the influence of the dimensions of “Information”, “Entertainment”, “Media Appeal”, “Social Presence” and “Risk for Privacy” on the “Customer Experience” and the latter on the “Purchase Intention”, under the consideration of the Uses and Gratifications Theory. Moderations due to Chatbot Usage Frequency for some of the relationships proposed are also analyzed. Methods: An empirical study was performed through a questionnaire to Spanish consumers. The statistical data analysis was conducted with R software through the lavaan package. To test the hypotheses from the conceptual model a structural equation modelling approach was adopted. Findings & value added: The results obtained identify the main characteristics of chatbots that can support brands to effectively develop their virtual assistants in order to manage their relational communication strategies and enhance their value proposal through the online customer journey. Findings demonstrate the contribution that chatbot dimensions make to the online consumer experience and its impact on the purchase intention, with the consideration of the moderating effect exercised by the user's level of experience (novice vs. experienced) with the use of chatbots. Regarding managerial implications, this research offers recommendations for e-commerce professionals to manage chatbots more effectively. The “Entertainment” and “Social Presence” dimensions can be operationalized at a visual (e.g., appearance of the avatar and text box, use of designs aligned with the website) and textual level (e.g., style and tone of voice, use of expressions typical of the target audience) to generate a feeling of proximity with the chatbot and facilitate its adoption. “Media Appeal” requires that the chatbot be easy to use, effective, and accessible, to facilitate its usability. Finally, mitigation of “Privacy Risk” concerns should be achieved by presenting an appropriate privacy policy and requesting permission for the use of customers’ private information.

Explicitation and ideology in media translation: The case of MEMRI

This article describes some of the socio-political (ideological) factors affecting the use of explicitation. It explores how explicitations are utilized by a media organisation whose translations continue to construct a negative public image of a particular community. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and descriptive and functional models to translation studies, a corpus consisting of 26,000 words from Arabic-English translated news articles published by MEMRI was analyzed. The results reveal a strong tendency in explicitations to maintain the ideological perspective of the original at the micro-textual level, while promoting a religious and cultural Other at the macro-level. Instead of compromising its credibility by using misleading or inaccurate explicitations, MEMRI uses apparently accurate and faithful explicitations in translations strategically selected to accentuate an intended negative image. This casts light on the paradoxical function of explicitation in media translation: while it is assumed to reduce ambiguities and improve cultural understanding at the textual level, it may promote misunderstanding and cultural prejudice at a larger discourse level.

A multimodal translation analysis of online app advertisements: the case of Careem as a Taxi-sharing app in Iraq

Abstract This research presents a multimodal translation analysis of 20 online advertisements (Ads) for Careem App from Arabic into English. It tries to examine what effects the multimodal elements have on the translation of these Ads; this can be done by shedding light on the similarities and differences of the verbal and visual contents on the one hand, and the consequent effects in rendering from Arabic into English, on the other. The analysis has shown that some mismatching was done by the translator in neglecting the message of the Ads by changing the linguistic content, without taking into consideration the relationship between the textual and visual contents. Examples of mismatching idioms, expressions, and collocations related to the Iraqi culture were found. Also, some Ads were identical in their visual elements, but the verbal content of the translated ones failed to convey the meaning of the source Ads due to cultural differences. The study has also found that the textual-visual relationship is not realized in most of the translated Ads on the word, and above word level. This, in turn, has a direct influence on the textual level; and has consequently led to instances of mismatching in rendering the whole meaning of the target message.

Analyzing Islamic Philosophy in Elif Shafak’s Forty Rules of Love

The objective of this analysis is to explore the Islamic Philosophy of Sufism within Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love. The research on the selected novel covers the Islamic philosophy of Sufism in the story and the characterization of the story and the philosophies of Sufism through the philosophy of Love in the story. The textual and content analysis is done by utilizing qualitative approach. By dissecting the novelist’s argument, from the textual level, small as speech, to the larger level of thematic argument and the arguments built about the core subject matters. The research concludes that Elif Shafak was able to incorporate and present the Islamic philosophy of Sufism through the characters and their progression through these philosophies. Thus, the novelist had managed to address the ways in which love is represented by the religion Islam and how it was presented through the teaching of Sufism. The authors had also discussed the way through which Sufism has been able to conquer and influence Elif's writing. The research covers historical account of 13th century Sufi, Rumi and Shams of Tabriz and provides a feminist perspective of the ways in which concepts of mystical and mundane get interlinked.

Networked masterplots

This article investigates engagement with propagandist TikTok videos shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with particular attention to the role of music and comments. By repurposing the infrastructure of TikTok sound-linking, our research upholds sensitivity to how this infrastructure enables affective and participatory workings of propaganda. We develop the notion of networked masterplots based on a situated analysis of how a specific sound, occasionally used in combination with pro-Russian hashtags, prescribes the creation of replicable linkages between three distinct video templates. The analysed templates, as we will show, not only intentionally share the use of the same song but adapt the theatrical effect of situation and suspense on the textual level of “stickers” or messages overlaid on top of videos. A selection of fifteen videos using the stickers – “What if they attack?”, “I am wondering how many will (un)subscribe?”, and “I am (not) ashamed” – in combination with a techno remix of the Soviet folk song Katyusha will be at the centre of our investigation. Arguing that in Katyusha videos situation and suspense are indivisible, we pay attention to the audiencing practices as they extend into both video comment sections and further memetic spin-offs. We conclude by reflecting on how TikTok sharing not only facilitates self-expression and social activism but also enables the weaponization of content within networked memetic environments.

AVERROES’ “EPISTLE ON DIVINE KNOWLEDGE” AS A DIALECTICAL WORK: BETWEEN FORBIDDEN INTERPRETATION AND PHILOSOPHICAL TRAINING

AbstractAverroes’ “Epistle on Divine Knowledge” presents four different dialogues on two textual levels. These dialogues, the syllogistic structure of the arguments in them, and their use of contradictories indicate that the “Epistle on Divine Knowledge” is structured nearly entirely in accordance with the descriptions of dialectic we find in Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle's Topica. Accordingly, Averroes’ solution to the question of how God can have universal knowledge of particular things is a dialectical account of the distinction between Divine and human knowledge. Moreover, at a crucial point in the “Epistle on Divine Knowledge” Averroes refers to Aristotle, Metaphysics Β, which he considers to a dialectical exposition of questions on metaphysics. This reference suggests that Averroes sees the “Epistle on Divine Knowledge” as a kind of dialectical inquiry aimed at answering questions that arise at the outset of studying metaphysics. So, while it is possible to view the “Epistle on Divine Knowledge” as a dialectical interpretation of Quran 67:14, its primary purpose is to introduce its readers to metaphysical speculation. Thus it does not violate Averroes’ legal prohibition given in the Decisive Treatise against declaring dialectical interpretations in books available to the general public.

Trans/Locatability: Performing Public Appearance in Locative Media

The promises and perils of visibility dominate many contemporary conversations about transgender life; this essay considers the ways in which locatability works alongside visibility to regulate the sphere of public appearance, informing who can safely appear and in what spaces they can or cannot do so. The locative performance Appear to Me (2020), written by gender-expansive artist eppchez yo-sí yes for the Philadelphia company Swim Pony, shows how such performance can challenge dominant constructions of location that involve the violent displacement of marginalized populations, as well as locative technologies—such as the Global Positioning System—that help create and sustain these constructions. Through a smartphone app that uses GPS to trigger audio cues, Appear to Me guides listeners along the Delaware River Trail in South Philadelphia, where they encounter the voices of people displaced from the waterfront, including street queens, houseless queers, and the land’s Indigenous Lenape inhabitants. I discuss how the performance both engages the politics of appearance on the textual level and performs new possibilities for appearance through its appropriation of GPS technology. In doing so, it enacts a trans epistemology of location I name trans/locatability: a multiply-emplaced, gender-expansive position of safety and solidarity that asserts the right of all bodies to appear in public without harm.

Readings in queer pleasure

This article analyzes the queer pleasures of the 2015 sf movie by the Wachowski sisters, Jupiter Ascending . We find that these pleasures operate on two intertwined levels: the movie’s campy villains and over-the-top aesthetics reflect the themes of queer temporality and reproduction on the textual level, while the straight romance of the protagonist draws on the queer archive of fan fiction. We engage with queer studies and fan studies as critical frameworks that allow us to center affective pleasures of recognizing well-established romantic tropes and character archetypes. Critical debates surrounding Jupiter Ascending point to a larger discussion concerning the space for pleasure within sf texts and sf fan communities, while the movie’s commitment to fan fiction tropes and narrative practices anticipates recent changes in media consumption and production patterns.

Machine-Learning-Based Approaches for Multi-Level Sentiment Analysis of Romanian Reviews

Sentiment analysis has increasingly gained significance in commercial settings, driven by the rising impact of reviews on purchase decision-making in recent years. This research conducts a thorough examination of the suitability of machine learning and deep learning approaches for sentiment analysis, using Romanian reviews as a case study, with the aim of gaining insights into their practical utility. A comprehensive, multi-level analysis is performed, covering the document, sentence, and aspect levels. The main contributions of the paper refer to the in-depth exploration of multiple sentiment analysis models at three different textual levels and the subsequent improvements brought with respect to these standard models. Additionally, a balanced dataset of Romanian reviews from twelve product categories is introduced. The results indicate that, at the document level, supervised deep learning techniques yield the best outcomes (specifically, a convolutional neural network model that obtains an AUC value of 0.93 for binary classification and a weighted average F1-score of 0.77 in a multi-class setting with 5 target classes), albeit with increased resource consumption. Favorable results are achieved at the sentence level, as well, despite the heightened complexity of sentiment identification. In this case, the best-performing model is logistic regression, for which a weighted average F1-score of 0.77 is obtained in a multi-class polarity classification task with three classes. Finally, at the aspect level, promising outcomes are observed in both aspect term extraction and aspect category detection tasks, in the form of coherent and easily interpretable word clusters, encouraging further exploration in the context of aspect-based sentiment analysis for the Romanian language.

Application of Corpus Analysis Software and Error Analysis Theory on Non-English Majors’ Chinese-English Translation Features

This research focuses on non-English major students’ Chinese-English (C-E) translation features. It aims at annotating and summarizing the features and error types in students’ C-E translation by applying to corpus analysis software Readability Analyzer. This study first collects students’ C-E translation texts from a computer-based exam, then forms a self-constructed corpus and a reference corpus. The translation materials in the target corpus and the reference corpus are first analyzed and compared by Readability Analyzer to figure out the features of students C-E translation texts from the perspectives of sentence length, word length, percentage of difficult words, Flesch Reading Ease, Dale-Chall Score, Fry Readability Grade Level. After that, different types of errors in students C-E translation are labeled and analyzed based on statistical analysis and Error Analysis (EA) theory. According to Readability Analyzer, students C-E translation texts have the following features. From passage statistics, it shows that translation texts that get lower scores tend to use shorter sentences and easier words. In addition, from readability scores, Flesch scores, Dale-Chall Scores shows and Fry Readability Grade Level are taken into consideration. Flesch scores shows that compared with the reference corpus, students’ translation which get lower scores are harder to understand since there are more language errors than higher-score translation. Dale-Chall Scores indicate that translation materials which score 8-9 are very close in the difficulty of word-using with the reference corpus. Fry Readability Grade Level shows that texts of lower scores are simpler and more accurate than texts of higher scores. According to Error Analysis (EA) Theory, students’ errors are further classified and discussed on lexical level, sentence level and textual level. The conclusions of this research are expected to make contributions to the improvement of C-E translation teaching and help college students, especially non-English majors, to enhance their C-E translation competence.

The Pragmatic Functions of High-Frequency Discourse Marker So in Chinese EFL Teacher Talk

Discourse markers have multiple pragmatic functions and have significant influences on classroom organization and teaching. This study aims to analyze the pragmatic functions of discourse marker so in a self-built corpus of Chinese middle school English classroom discourse. The corpus analysis shows that discourse marker so has various pragmatic functions, including marking results and inferences, managing topics, summarizing, rewording and giving examples at the textual level. Besides, at the interactional level, so functions as a marker of speech acts such as questions, requests, opinions, elicitations and confirmations. The research shows that discourse marker so can make classroom discourse more closely linked, promote students’ understanding of teacher’s discourse and create a harmonious classroom atmosphere. The findings of this research might have important implications for English teaching and teachers’ professional development in middle schools.

Lengvai suprantama kalba socialinei įtraukčiai – atvejo aprašymas

The research is devised as a case study focused on the study course “Easy Language for Social Inclusion” developed within the ERASMUS+ project “Promoting Easy-to-Read Language for Social Inclusion/PERLSI”. The discussion is contextualized within a broader discourse on the training opportunities available for translators in the project countries (Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia). The macro-level of analysis introduces the socio-political frame of discourse on inclusion and information accessibility. The meso-level discussion evolves around the Easy language translator’s profile, based on the best practice offered by German scholars (Maaß and Rink 2020) and the immediate experience acquired during the project. Micro-level analysis offers insights into the course syllabus, the study materials developed to ensure the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary for reducing cognitive load at lexical, syntactic, and textual levels as well as the visual language of the text.

Du Fu’s conspicuous negativity and Li Bai’s hidden positivity: a sentiment comparison and exploration

Abstract In the studies of classical Chinese poetry, the comparison between Li Bai and Du Fu is an everlasting topic, yielding many qualitative interpretations, among which a widely known but disputable one is Li’s positivity versus Du’s negativity. With the development of digital means, distant reading has become possible, and the sentiment issue can be further explored in quantitative ways. This research conducts a corpus-based sentiment comparison of Li and Du with a self-constructed sentiment dictionary. The Complete Collection of Tang Poems is used as a representative of Tang poets, and sentiment comparisons are made at the levels of poems, verses, and characters, as well as key characters extracted with the log-likelihood measure. Analyses show that (1) among Tang poets, Du is more negative at all of the above textual levels, while Li is only more positive at the key character level, proving the importance of key characters in readers’ perception of sentiment; (2) Li and Du both stand out among Tang poets with a negative depiction of the dark reality and a positive expression of grand ideals; and (3) Li’s positivity is largely embodied in his depictions of color, light, and temperature, while Du’s negativity is closely related to his psychological description. To conclude, this research has not only determined the sentiment difference between Li and Du but also located its sources in texts with a novel key character-based sentiment analysis approach. Keywords:

Transgressive Russianness: Claiming authenticity in the Russian woman assemblage

The question of sociolinguistic authenticity has been widely researched with reference to authentic linguistic production and authentic language users. Globalization and intense language contacts have brought increased attention to the question of authenticity as it applies to what linguistic and cultural production is considered authentic and what facets of linguistic and cultural production are most salient to authenticity. The study examines the notion of authenticity in relation to the linguistic presentation of Russian womanhood by the Tajik-Russian singer Manizha in her song Russian woman . We aim to show how linguistic and cultural transgression underlying her performance prompted contestable interpretations and opened up the evaluative divide among the audience. Using Pennycook’s semiotics of transignification (Pennycook 2007), we analyze the performance at different levels (pretextual history, contextual relations, subtextual and intertextual meanings, and post-textual interpretations). We juxtapose the song, the singer’s post-performance interviews, and the viewers’ online comments in order to reveal the authenticating and deauthenticating discourses of gender and ethnicity. We have identified the opposing conceptions of Russian womanhood in the performance, both of which can be deemed authentic or inauthentic. We argue that authentication and deauthentication of this textual assemblage are driven by different ideologies and often depend on a single textual level or element. Moreover, authenticity may be recontextualized and renegotiated through discourse. The study highlights the co-existence of multiple and competing authenticies within a single multimodal performance and demonstrates how semiotics of transignification may be used to un-cover these competing ideological orientations.