ISSUE 2009, 2
Cross-cultural Accommodation through a Transformation of Consciousness
Patrick Boylan
University of Roma Tre (Italy)
This paper discusses a little-described but essential competence for successfully communicating in intercultural contexts: the ability to 'accommodate,' redefined here as the capacity to 'decentre oneself' into the world view of an interlocutor – or of a text to translate. In fact, this paper holds that achieving genuine entente with culturally diverse interlocutors and realizing truly communicative translations are behavioural competencies that require the same superordinate attitudinal competence: the ability to situate oneself empathetically within a diverse world view and, as a quasi member of that world, interpret and generate discourse. How strange it is then that, while learning to accommodate is the heart of intercultural training for diplomats and negotiators, it is absent from the syllabi of most university language courses and translation seminars!
The theoretical contribution of this paper will therefore be to widen Giles & Coupland's (1991) traditional definition of 'accommodation' – focused largely on linguistic convergence – and assert that, in intercultural exchanges, successful accommodation requires, above all, cultural (existential) convergence. Less demanding forms of verbal accommodation are also possible, of course. This paper lists five kinds in all and rates their relative effectiveness. But accommodation by unilateral cultural convergence is claimed to be generally the most effective interactional mode and thus the primary competence to be taught to language students, translators, and international negotiators.
Being International: what do international managers and professionals really think is important – and do the experts agree?
Nigel Ewington, Richard Lowe & David Trickey,
WorldWork Ltd, London
Results from a database of over 2000 practicing managers with international roles who have completed a self assessment questionnaire, The International Profiler, seem to indicate that gender, expatriation experience and national culture influence the extent to which professionals emphasise a range of 22 international success factors. By combining these results with a survey on how 125 interculturalists rank the same 22 dimensions of international competence we can suggest some key similarities and differences between the perceptions of professionals in the field and the trainers, consultants and academics who develop them.
Direction of mobility and its implications for the U-curve theory
Inmaculada Soriano García
University of Granada (Spain)
The increase in student mobility exchanges over the last decades has been accompanied by a growing interest in understanding the factors within which mobility exchanges take place. In this sense, student mobility is closely related to existing studies that intend to define and explain the concept of culture shock. This paper seeks to determine factors that affect students’ exchange experiences as well as to promote discussion regarding the U-curve theory.
The U-curve theory has been used to describe the cross-cultural adjustment process of employers, sojourners or students within a host culture showing the different stages experienced by people moving from a home to a host country. Starting from the U-curve theory, this paper is based on a study including both directions within the same mobility programme framework undertaken by future translators. That is, both Spanish Translation students who study part of their degree in Russia and Russian Translation students who study in Spain.
The results show strong differences in the students’ experiences depending on the direction of mobility. Thus, the level of adaptation of Russian students to Spain is quite high and the subjects usually respond to a U-curve scheme, while Spanish students have a lower level of adaptation and the exchange stages experienced by these students do not necessarily respond to the above mentioned theory, so that the resulting curve does not appear like a U but more like a J.
This paper illustrates that prior orientation is an essential aspect in order to facilitate effective cultural adaptation. Also, this paper indicates that the implementation of strategies that help students to cope with culture shock is a crucial aspect to be taken into account.
Exploring cultural knowings in language learning:
the case of Turkish mobility students
Anna Franca Plastina
University of Calabria (Italy)
Nowadays, it is widely accepted that culture and language are closely related (Nieto 2002) and that research and language pedagogy need to link language teaching to that of culture (Kramsch 1998). This paper draws from the experience of a teacher mobility stay at the Technical University of Istanbul in Turkey to run a short Italian language preparation course for a group of Turkish tertiary students before their mobility stay in Italy. The paper first examines the key issue of how cultural knowings play a decisive role in building a new centre of interaction (Alred et al. 2002) in intercultural encounters, as they underlie different intercultural abilities. It then considers the importance of learning how to develop repertoires of cultural knowings in mobility language learning contexts, where the language teacher’s roles are decisive in building these first steps towards intercultural competence. Following Moran’s (2001) Cultural Knowings Framework, the paper reports on the case study carried out to diagnose the Turkish tertiary students’ cultural knowings: knowing how (cultural practices), knowing why (cultural perspectives), knowing oneself (self-awareness), knowing about (cultural information), whilst still in their safe cultural environment. Diagnostic findings were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, and then systematised using the Intercultural Competence Assessment (INCA) framework (Byram et al. 2004). Calibrating students’ initial levels of intercultural competence was insightful to tailor course objectives in order to enable them to broaden their cultural knowings. In turn, this learning process was helpful in sensitising students’ cultural mindset before facing the challenges of a new cultural environment.
Intercultural Mediation in the Mono-lingual,
Mono-cultural Foreign Language Classroom: A Case Study in Japan
Stephanie Houghton
University of Kitakyushu (Japan)
Mediating between conflicting interpretations of phenomena is a goal of the intercultural speaker (Byram 1997). But can intercultural mediation skills be developed through foreign language education when the only foreigner in the class is the teacher, and the students all share the same native-language and cultural background? One possible teaching approach involves teachers encouraging learners to analyse and evaluate cultural difference, but also attempting to align their values with specific universal values to develop a democratic society supportive of human rights (Guilherme 2002). In this study, qualitative data were gathered over a twelve-week period from twelve Japanese student participants and me as a British teacher-researcher. Value differences between students were systematically uncovered, and mediation generated change. Critical evaluation was found to support the mediation process but although the teacher transmitted specific target values, the impact of the values and viewpoints of other students seemed to be just as, if not more, important.
ISSUE 2008
The Translator’s Constrained Mediation in Trans-Editing of News
Texts Narrating Political Conflicts
Yamei Chen
National Taipei University of Technology
News organisations are socially, economically and politically situated, so news texts are inevitably produced from certain perspectives, be they social, cultural or political. To meet the expectations and interests of the target audience, news translators usually need to customise source news texts in terms of the receiving perspectives. Trans-editing can assist news translators in achieving such a need of adaptation through various trans-editing strategies. This kind of translator’s mediation is not totally at random but systematic and norm-governed by various contextual factors. Some previous studies have already adopted empirical news data to illustrate how the news translator’s mediation is influenced by contextual factors. Nevertheless, there are two aspects that have thus far rarely been explored: (1) the impacts of contextual factors on the translator’s mediation on the overall structures of news items, and (2) the constraints on the translator’s mediation imposed by the interplay of different contextual factors. Accordingly, this paper carries out a case study on trans-editing of news texts narrating political conflicts to address these inadequacies.
The data examined in the case study cover some news texts about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and their trans-edited Chinese versions from the China Times and the Commercial Times in Taiwan. To explore the translator’s constrained mediation, the source and target news texts are compared and contrasted in the light of their relevant contextual factors and overall news structures (both schematic and semantic). By examining the underlying reasons behind the regular shifts in the target news structures, this paper makes clear how the news translator’s mediation is systematically governed by the Taiwanese government’s political policies, the target newspapers’ audience design and the trans-editing conventions in Taiwan’s journalistic culture.
Company websites, genre conventions and the role of the translator
David Limon
Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
These days, all companies that are concerned with their image have a website that is likely to include, among other things, a company presentation, vision and mission statement. The form and content of these sites is heavily influenced by Anglo-American models, and yet the relevant genre conventions have still not become globally standardised, due to cultural differences ranging from general text conventions to the differing histories of the societies in which these companies function. A particularly interesting example is that of countries in Central and Eastern Europe that made the transition to a free-market economy less than two decades ago and are now striving to 'catch up' with their longer-established West European competitors. In the country on which I shall focus, Slovenia, it has become standard for these websites to be translated into English to meet the needs of the wider non-Slovene audience – including speakers of German, Italian, French and the Slavic languages spoken in the region. The way the texts are written and translated raises interesting questions about both cultural transfer and the role of the translator in the globalised, online age. These include: the problems involved in identifying the target audience and target culture in web-based communication; the growing role of English as a lingua franca within Europe, in spite of the European Union's policy of multiligualism; and the apparent cultural hegemony of Anglo-American models of business communication. There is also the issue of whether, in the situation discussed, the translator is functioning as an expert in text formation and an intercultural mediator, or rather as a language specialist involved in a more constrained linguistic transfer.
Translation vs. Language Learning in International Institutions.
Explaining the Diversity Paradox
Anthony Pym
Intercultural Studies Group
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Tarragona, Spain
The diversity paradox may be expressed as an apparent contradiction between the rise of an international lingua franca, which should lead to lesser linguistic diversity, and increased use of translation, which should produce greater linguistic diversity. The paradox is that both these tendencies are occurring at the same time. It is suggested that one key to this paradox is to be found in the institutionalized nature of cross-cultural communication. Three models are presented of the way translation may operate within international institutions. One of the models, relying on a centralized production language and a multiplicity of target languages, is shown to be compatible with the diversity paradox.
Towards an “activist” translation pedagogy
Federica Scarpa
SSLMIT (University of Trieste)
Translations are carried out in every area of human knowledge, which makes the study of translations interdisciplinary by its very nature. However, from a more research-oriented perspective, the interdisciplinary nature of translation has meant that different approaches developed in other disciplines (linguistics, language teaching, literary studies, cognitive psychology, cultural studies, business etc.) have been applied to the study of translations, contributing to the complex interdiscipline of Translation Studies (TS). The scholars belonging to these different perspectives have often had communication problems which are due to a basic lack of homogeneity of their research methodologies and the terminology they use. Thus the interdisciplinarity of translation has sometimes come to mean that TS is less an autonomous discipline and more a “federation” of different subdisciplines. However laudable, the attempt of finding common ground between these different approaches by Andrew Chesterman and Rosemary Arrojo (2000) was based on the premise that two main paradigms could be identified, an empirical-descriptive approach (represented by Chesterman) and a postmodernist approach oriented towards cultural studies and textual theories (represented by Arrojo).
With special reference to a pedagogy of scientific and technical translation aiming at building a professional competence in the students, this article argues that this dichotomy is not “delicate” enough because it lumps together in the empirical-descriptive paradigm at least three very different ways of approaching the study of translation: the linguist’s, the professional translator’s and the translation scholar’s. It will be further argued that in a university-level specialist-translation course all three approaches should be present and that, based on James Holmes’ two paradigms of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Applied Translation Studies (ATS), the teacher/scholar has the moral responsibility to both describe and prescribe. Following Tymoczko’s (2000) “activist translation” model and Ulrych’s (1999) “evidence-based approach”, an “activist translation pedagogy” to professional specialist translation is proposed, where the task of the teacher is seen as getting actively involved in presenting the students with descriptive norms based on solid empirical evidence but in a critical and, ultimately, prescriptive way, i.e. also offering a practical solution to translation problems (see Scarpa 2008, pp. 77-82).
Identifying and translating irony across cultures
Eliana Terminiello
University of Napoli - Federico II
Emerging as an approach to life, in which the ironist adopts an attitude of scepticism and mistrust in relation to everyday language (Colebrook 2004), irony can be considered a peculiar aspect of daily conversation and, as Gibbs and Colston (2001: 187-200) aptly remark, it “[…] is particularly useful in conveying both humorous and hostile attitudes in everyday communication” and it is elicited mostly via implicatures and inferences (Attardo 2001).
Much of the research on irony has focused on the rhetorical use of it in literature and poetry (Byron, 1972), written and spoken language (Anolli, Ciceri and Infantino: 2002) or in relation to humour (Chiaro, 2006). Since irony is subjective and pervasive in language, this work aims to build up an objective framework that can contribute to its identification in conversational settings in a more systematic way. Another research question concerns its usage across cultures, namely English and Italian.
In order to carry out this analysis I have chosen 10 different American and British films from different genres and some selected ironic exchanges have been investigated. The comparative analysis between the English and the Italian version has taken into account Pavesi’s (2005) and Malone’s (1988) strategies even though, translation strategies do not constitute one of the purposes of my research, but only a means which help the investigation of the transposition of the Language Devices which convey irony from a language to another. In other words, these strategies allow me to shed light on the cultural factors which are behind the choices of the elements for translating irony. Contrastively speaking, in ironic contexts exaggeration seems to be more pervasive in Italian than in English in line with the cultural orientations outlined by Katan (1999).
