98 research outputs found
Translators' and target readers' reconstruction of regionalism in Taiwan's regional prose literature
The object of this research is to investigate the dynamic nature of identity construction of a regional place in English translations. The study focuses on the analysis of Wang Zhenheâs works in translation. The Regional Prose Literature of Taiwan was developed when writers began to examine their identity and sense of belonging under Japanese colonization (1895-1945) and later the rule of the Nationalist government under Martial Law (1949-1987) by using narrative and descriptive prose as a vehicle for presenting the distinctiveness of the island. The dialects, the colonial language, local customs and scenes which regional writers created in their stories brought out what they saw as the uniqueness of Taiwan identity. However, Taiwan, like Hong Kong, has been categorized by many scholars as part of the Han-Chinese-influenced region, which shares the same cultural identity. Translating Taiwan, therefore, depends on how a translator understands and (re)constructs its cultural and political discourse in translation. This thesis uses a cognitive-pragmatic model (CPM) to describe how a translation of regional prose literature communicates to readers of the target culture. The CPM in translation studies looks at translation from the aspects of literary communication and the comprehension process. It enables the researcher (1) to study the textual signals of a place which readers used to construct the text of the source cultural world; (2) to examine how these signals were conveyed in the target text; (3) to study the likely effects on specific readers who have little or no knowledge of the source text culture. The major finding of this study is that communication through translated literature depends not only on the translatorâs roles as a reader and a rewriter, but also on target readersâ processing effort and literary competence. Textual analysis shows that the translatorsâ decisions on conveying regional signals in translations often affect readersâ comprehension of the target text (TT). When the translation is too literal and the cultural signal is unfamiliar to the target readers, those who have little or no knowledge of Taiwan have more difficulties understanding the text. Reader response studies also show that the use of footnotes in the literary translation is not always unacceptable by the readers when specific regional elements are preserved in the TT. Target readersâ reception of cultural signals relies firstly on their existing knowledge and secondly on the information they receive from the translation. Effective communication therefore results from a translatorâs assumption of target readersâ schemas and efforts in making the translation comprehensible and coherent, especially when there are regional elements in the translation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Translators' and target readers' reconstruction of regionalism in Taiwan's regional prose literature
The object of this research is to investigate the dynamic nature of identity construction of a regional place in English translations. The study focuses on the analysis of Wang Zhenheâs works in translation. The Regional Prose Literature of Taiwan was developed when writers began to examine their identity and sense of belonging under Japanese colonization (1895-1945) and later the rule of the Nationalist government under Martial Law (1949-1987) by using narrative and descriptive prose as a vehicle for presenting the distinctiveness of the island. The dialects, the colonial language, local customs and scenes which regional writers created in their stories brought out what they saw as the uniqueness of Taiwan identity. However, Taiwan, like Hong Kong, has been categorized by many scholars as part of the Han-Chinese-influenced region, which shares the same cultural identity. Translating Taiwan, therefore, depends on how a translator understands and (re)constructs its cultural and political discourse in translation. This thesis uses a cognitive-pragmatic model (CPM) to describe how a translation of regional prose literature communicates to readers of the target culture. The CPM in translation studies looks at translation from the aspects of literary communication and the comprehension process. It enables the researcher (1) to study the textual signals of a place which readers used to construct the text of the source cultural world; (2) to examine how these signals were conveyed in the target text; (3) to study the likely effects on specific readers who have little or no knowledge of the source text culture. The major finding of this study is that communication through translated literature depends not only on the translatorâs roles as a reader and a rewriter, but also on target readersâ processing effort and literary competence. Textual analysis shows that the translatorsâ decisions on conveying regional signals in translations often affect readersâ comprehension of the target text (TT). When the translation is too literal and the cultural signal is unfamiliar to the target readers, those who have little or no knowledge of Taiwan have more difficulties understanding the text. Reader response studies also show that the use of footnotes in the literary translation is not always unacceptable by the readers when specific regional elements are preserved in the TT. Target readersâ reception of cultural signals relies firstly on their existing knowledge and secondly on the information they receive from the translation. Effective communication therefore results from a translatorâs assumption of target readersâ schemas and efforts in making the translation comprehensible and coherent, especially when there are regional elements in the translation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources
We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unify
existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to
previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have brought
together 137 datasets and 118 standardized data loaders. The quality of the
datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their value is
demonstrated through multiple experiments. NusaCrowd's data collection enables
the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language
understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of
Indonesia. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual
automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and the local languages of
Indonesia. Our work strives to advance natural language processing (NLP)
research for languages that are under-represented despite being widely spoken
From invisible to visible : representations and self-representaions of Hakka women In Hong Kong, 1900s-present
What we perceive as the essential characteristics of Hakka women today are in fact historically constructed and utilized for various purposes by different agents, including Western missionaries, Hakka elites, museum curators and heritage preservationists. This long historical process has made the Hakka women increasingly visible in the public scene. Some scholars argue that it was the men who attempted to manipulate the representations of Hakka women to justify their exploitation of women. As Hung Hsin-lan and Helen Siu have reminded us, the study of Hakka women should be liberated from the lens of exploitation and victimhood and we should position Hakka women in relation to Hakka men to achieve a more balanced analysis. In addition to examining the historical writings about Hakka and Hakka women since the nineteenth century, this thesis focuses on Hong Kong, and also considers the topic through a gender lens, to evaluate the roles that Hakka women have played in the museums and in the surging wave of cultural preservation.
The aim of this thesis is to explain how Hakka women have been represented in various media and what has constituted our current perceptions and (mis)understandings toward Hakka women. While the Hakka women have been singled out to represent Hakka culture and have enjoyed the opportunity to create their self-representations, where have the Hakka men gone? What does it mean by a âHakkaâ when the Hakka identity is historically constructed in the first place? The present research adopts a combined historical and anthropological approach to rethink the images of Hakka women and review the interactions between the representations and self-representation of Hakka women in the displays and heritage preservation, which point to the broader themes of the interplays between colonialism and ethnicities, the politics of display, gender studies on exhibition and cultural heritage, and the impacts of global cultural trends on local culture formulation
Radical Belonging: School as Communion of Peoples, Place, and Power
In wondering âHow are decolonizing, place/land-based, and community-grown learning places created and sustained as alternatives to dominant settler-colonial systems, and what stories would they share about their creation and existence?â, I formed relationships with two alternative, autonomous, decolonizing schools through a teacher-guide at each school who served as guides for me to enter their spaces with invitation. In developing these relationships over 2-3 years and spending 2-3 weeks alongside each of them at their school sites, I was able to sustain natural and deep conversation with my teacher-guides, who then served as co-storyers of this research to collectively consider research questions through the lens of their stories and lived realities in their schools. This study was carried out through narrative storywork, Indigenous and culturally responsive methodologies, and critical autoethnography, as my experience of entering these school communities and forming these relationships over time became a supporting contribution to the data. Data is regarded as all the stories, conversations, reflections, observations, intuited moments, and elements of portraiture that were gathered through this process of sustained relationship with my co-storyers and my dedicated time in being within and experiencing each school space. I identified four major themes as emergent from the data: (1) a necessary process, (2) school as communion, (3) a radical existence, and (4) belonging. Dialogue with my co-storyers about the emergent themes suggests that this work of creating decolonizing, community-grown, place-specific alternatives to settler-state educational systems is necessary across many communities; yet, entering this work requires a necessary process of individual and collective work to align to place-appropriate, decolonized, and Indigenous principals of place, community, culture, and work. Data also suggests that creating such schools is radical yet sustainable and that these schools embody a paradigmatic shift from colonizing, individualistic systems toward collective, communal systems aligned with Indigenous and anti-colonial communities. Furthermore, the data and dialogue suggest that within this work of growing such place-specific communal schools, members of the community are often afforded a greater sense of belonging and collective ownership over their educational experience. Both schools in the study also demonstrated a positive impact on the place and land on which their school was situated. Therefore, this study implicates that there is value in seeking and growing schools outside of the dominant system and that communities who seek to grow such place and person-specific schools can experience great benefit for both human and more-than-human members of the community.
Keywords: alternative-autonomous school, communal school, school as communion, decolonizing, anti-colonial, Indigenous-aligned, Indigenous methodology, decolonizing communities, portraiture, critical autoethnography, co-storying research, narrative storywork, belonging, culturally responsive methodologies, place-based, land-based, resisting settler-state, sustainable systems thinking, HÄlau KĆ« MÄna, Angeles Workshop School, revolutionary schools, diverse communities, students of colo
Writing "Taiwanese": The PĂ©h-oÄ-jÄ« romanization and identity construction in Taiwan, 1860s-1990s
This dissertation explores how PeÌh-oÄ-jÄ« (Jiaohui roma zi/Baihua zi, literally meaning âchurch romanizationâ or âvernacular scriptâ in Chinese, POJ hereafter) was transformed from a âforeignâ writing system as a religious tool for Bible study into an identity arker for various groups of âTaiwaneseâ (Taiwan ren) in Taiwan from 1865 through the 1990s. Under three political regimesâ the Qing Empire, Japanese colonial rule, and the post-war Nationalist regime, POJ, originally created by the Presbyterian Church missionaries for Taiwanese peoples in the 1860s, was utilized in proselytism, school education, medical study, and as an expression of Taiwanese culture and nationalism under different social, political, and cultural circumstances. Looking into the various ways whereby POJ has become symbolically associated with different identities deepens our understanding of how it was important in the process and politics of identity making in modern Taiwan. Based on POJ materials, I aim to provide the first history of POJ literacy in Taiwan and to provide an analysis of the critical role of POJ in the formation of âTaiwaneseâ identities in modern China
A computer-assisted pproach to the comparison of mainland southeast Asian languages
This cumulative thesis is based on three separate projects based on a computer-assisted language comparison (CALC) framework to address common obstacles to studying the history of Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) languages, such as sparse and non-standardized lexical data, as well as an inadequate method of cognate judgments, and to provide caveats to scholars who will use Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. The first project provides a format that standardizes the sound inventories, regulates language labels, and clarifies lexical items. This standardized format allows us to merge various forms of raw data. The format also summarizes information to assist linguists in researching the relatedness among words and inferring relationships among languages. The second project focuses on increasing the transparency of lexical data and cognate judg- ments with regard to compound words. The method enables the annotation of each part of a word with semantic meanings and syntactic features. In addition, four different conversion methods were developed to convert morpheme cognates into word cognates for input into the Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. The third project applies the methods used in the first project to create a workflow by merging linguistic data sets and inferring a language tree using a Bayesian phylogenetic algorithm. Further- more, the project addresses the importance of integrating cross-disciplinary studies into historical linguistic research. Finally, the methods we proposed for managing lexical data for MSEA languages are discussed and summarized in six perspectives. The work can be seen as a milestone in reconstructing human prehistory in an area that has high linguistic and cultural diversity
Developing a Hlaâalua Learnerâs Guide: In Search of an Auxiliary Remedy for Hlaâalua Revitalization (Exegesis) and A Hlaâalua Learnerâs Guide (Creative component)
This study contains a Learnerâs Guide to Hlaâalua (See
Appendix A), a moribund Austronesian language in Taiwan, and an
exegesis of this work. Language shift has taken place in the
Hlaâalua community, consequently only few fluent speakers
remain. Most people speak Mandarin, Southern Min and Bunun on a
daily basis (Chiu, 2008; Kuo, 2012; Pan, 2012) and no longer use
Hlaâalua for everyday communication. While the government is
supportive of language revitalization, the current revival
program targets children only, and the outcomes of revitalization
remain uncertain (Kuo, 2012). This research aims to identify the
gaps and customize complementary language learning materials for
Hlaâalua adults as an auxiliary remedy to the situation.
The project reviews the language ecology, the language education
and the pedagogical materials available for the community.
Additionally, the author evaluates the Australian experience of
compiling Indigenous Australian language grammars. The analysis
identifies a need to develop a Learnerâs Guide for adult
learners, which explains the spelling system and transforms the
existing reference grammar (Pan, 2012) into an accessible
grammar. It is designed for community members to learn the basics
of Hlaâalua on their own, as there is limited access to native
speakers and lack of trained teachers. Also, the Learnerâs
Guide incorporates multilingual resources to enhance learning
outcomes. Since the target learners are exposed to other
languages, methods of
teaching literacy in their first language (Taiwanese Mandarin)
and techniques of teaching English as a foreign language are
utilized to accelerate learnersâ progress. This project makes a
contribution to Hlaâalua language revival and provides insights
into development of learning materials for other endangered
languages in Taiwan
Chinese children's experiences of biliteracy learning in Scotland
This thesis explores the experiences of Chinese children acquiring literacy in both
Chinese and English in Scotland. A three-dimensional research design is adopted in
order to take into account the influential domains where children are exposed to
literacy learning. First, it investigates the attitudes and approaches to literacy
learning in fourteen Chinese homes, with evidence gathered from semi-structured
interviews with parents. Second, observations of and conversations with children and
Chinese teachers in a Chinese complementary school in the central belt of Scotland
provide insights into the approaches to teaching and learning Chinese literacy. Third,
miscue analysis of reading and thinking aloud protocols are conducted in mainstream
schools with six Chinese boys, aged eight to nine years, in order to analyse in depth
the reading strategies deployed by children in their attempts to gain meaning from
both Chinese and English texts. The findings reveal that Chinese parents provide a
rich learning environment where children consolidate and in some cases extend the
literacy learning experiences gained in the complementary Chinese school. What also
emerges from the research is that while the children in the study have a great deal of
metalinguistic and metacognitive knowledge gained from learning diverse writing
systems, this knowledge is not recognised within policy or practice in mainstream
schools. Finally, Hornbergerâs Continua of Biliteracy are used as a model both in
order to analyse the mosaic of qualitative data generated during the research process
and to provide a framework for a discussion of educational policy and practice in
multilingual Scotland
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