Security, population and governmentality : UK counter-terrorism discourse (2007-2011)

Over the past decade, governments worldwide have taken initiatives both at a national and supra-national level in order to prevent terrorist attacks from militant groups. This paper analyses a corpus of policy documents which sets out the policy for UK national security. Informed by Foucault’s (2007) theory of governmentality, as well as critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this paper analyses the ways in which the liberal state in late modernity realizes security as discursive practice. A corpus of 110 documents produced by the UK government relating to security in the wake of the 7/7 attacks between 2007 and 2011 was assembled. The paper analyses the discursive constitution of the Foucaultian themes of regulation, knowledge and population, though carrying out a qualitative analysis of relevant key wards, patterns of collocation, as well as features of connotation and semantic prosody

Second Language Acquisition

This volume presents a collection of current research on pedagogies, practices and perspectives in the field of second language acquisition. It brings together different aspects of learning, teaching and researching a second language with chapters covering a range of topics from emotional communication, pragmatic competence, transformative pedagogy, inclusion, reflective teaching and innovative research methodologies. The authors address a global audience to offer insights into contemporary theories, research, policies and practices in second language acquisition. This collection of work is aimed at students, teachers and researchers wishing to reflect on current developments and identify potential research directions

Genre-based teaching of medical translation

This paper describes the advances in teaching medical translation in Hungary. since the 1950s English has become the dominant language in health sciences, and there is an increased need for English–Hungarian translators in the field. Our medical translator programme has undergone several changes in the past 25 years answering the current needs. Our main objective is to develop the textual and communicative competence of students, teach them problem solving strategies and tactics, and encourage their creativity as an addition to the knowledge of translation theory and linguistics and of the knowledge of English/Hungarian for medical purposes. Developing their translation competence is based on the concept of text genre. Mediation is taught by providing them health related texts with text models and patterns that they can use for textual, conceptual, linguistic and terminological reference

Humour support and emotive stance in comments on Korean TV Drama

Viewers on viki.com comment on Korean television drama series while watching: They produce timed comments tied to the timecode of the audiovisual stream. Among the functions these comments have in the community, the expression of emotive stance is central. Importantly, this includes humour support encoded in a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic ways. Our study identifies a range of humour support indicators, which allow us to find comments that are responses to humour. Accordingly, our study explores how commenters make use of the affordances of the Viki timed comment feature to linguistically and paralinguistically encode their humorous reaction to fictional events and to previous comments. We do this both quantitatively e based on a multilingual corpus of all 320,118 timed comments that accompany five Korean dramas we randomly selected (80 episodes in total), and qualitatively based on the in-depth analysis of two episodes. What we contribute is a typology and the distribution of humour support indicators used in a novel genre of technology-mediated communication as well as insights into how the viewing community collectively does humour support. Finally, we also present the semi-automatic detection of humour support as a viable strategy to objectively identify humour-relevant scenes in Korean TV drama

Crisis Translation Training Challenges Arising from New Contexts of Translation

Focused on material design and self-reflective practices, this article discusses a Crisis Translation Training pitched at master-level translation and interpreting students, developed within the research activities carried out for the INTERACT International Crisis Translation Network. The course was designed to enable them to develop a broader skillset in support of multilingual crisis settings. The learning objectives underpinning the materials address training lacunae in enabling linguists to be involved in relief operations (Federici, 2016; O’Brien, 2016). The authors perceive the complementary skills as crucial in the development of language mediation services assisting linguists operating in such zones of liminality as are crisis settings. Multilingual communication in crisis includes professional forms of translation, signing, and interpreting, as well as forms of intercultural mediation, and social work (Drugan, 2017). Emergencies and prolonged crises have an impact on the communicative dynamics among international relief operators, local institutions, and crisis-affected populations. The authors developed training materials to prepare students to work in crisis settings by harnessing their language competences in crisis translation as a form of community translation (Taibi and Ozolins, 2016). Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities often need support in language combinations that rarely match commercially viable combinations (Federici and Cadwell, 2018; Shackleton, 2018). This article critically reviews non-language specific Crisis Translation Training, delivered in three iterations across two sites. Reporting on the first phases of the process of material design and enhancement, the article reflects on how issues in delivery, emerging findings regarding the authentic needs of mostly untrained translators, and different pathways of delivery shaped the re-definition of the initial learning objectives and pushed towards a translator trainer approach that would suit a range of new contexts of language mediation

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWith much of the focus on empathy coming from the professional contexts of psychology and the medical field, this study moves the scope of empathy research towards understanding how empathic communication is experienced in the personal lives of individuals. A constructivist's approach to grounded theory is used to explore the way a group of students experienced and learned communicative empathy over the course of a semester. Using symbolic interaction as a theoretical lens, this research project centers on two aspects of empathy. First, using empathy journals as a means to access students' personal experiences, it calls attention to the communicative behaviors that the students perceived as paramount to creating an empathic interaction. Second, it highlights how the students' working models of empathy changed over the course of the semester. Drawing on message design logic, the analysis shows that at the outset of the course, the students drew on linear models of communication and a predominantly expressive design logic to conceptualize empathy. By the end of the semester, the majority of the students developed more sophisticated design logics and articulated a view of empathy that was rooted in a transactional model of communication. The limitations and implications of this research are discussed in the final chapter

The role of emotional intelligence in enhancing intercultural sensitivity

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Emotions have been noted for their crucial role in survival behaviour relating to resistance to cross-cultural ambiguity. Today's globalised multinational corporations (MNCs) have recognised the importance of developing their diverse workforces' intercultural sensitivity (ICS) – a worldview towards cultural difference – as a means of reducing resistance to cross-cultural ambiguity hence maintaining a professional multicultural work environment. However, no studies have yet been made investigating the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in enhancing intercultural sensitivity and simultaneously regulating emotions produced from resistance to cultural difference. Therefore, this study has explored the role of EI in enhancing ICS aiming at increasing the effectiveness of intercultural training within the context of multinational organisations. A theoretical framework was constructed presenting the idea of EI entry-points into intercultural sensitivity and resistance to difference. Through an inductive research approach, a chosen multinational airline company's flight attendants were targeted with in-depth semi-structured interviews. Grounded theory analysis was applied. The analysis resulted in the development of a grounded emotional-cognitive intercultural adaptation process together with three adaptive cognitive states. These were named: Learn, Understand, and Know. Each cognitive state was noted to be associated with a particular emotional state that causes the interacting individual to shift into the relevant cognitive state. The emotions surprise and curiosity were found to be associated with Learn while empathy was found to be associated with Understand, and finally acceptance was found to be associated with Know. The research results strongly support the proposed EI entry-points within the grounded emotional-cognitive content of the produced intercultural adaptation process. The results address the research aim regarding the role of EI in enhancing ICS. Through the EI entry-points, ICS is indirectly enhanced through the development of intercultural performance as EI mental abilities are proposed which would regulate one's behaviour towards the three grounded emotional-cognitive intercultural adaptation states. The developed model is suggested to contribute to enhancing the effectiveness of intercultural training. The trainee's intercultural performance could be enhanced through directing the emotional-cognitive dynamics, during intercultural interaction, towards the empirically grounded set of emotional-cognitive states. As linking EI and ICS remains an important and under-explored topic, it is hoped that the findings of this study will present a better understanding of the dynamics of emotions within the context of multinational organisations, as well as the role of EI in enhancing ICS, subsequently leading to further research

The how of literature

A critical discussion of the concept of 'performance literature' as applied to the cross-cultural and comparative analysis of literature, with special but not exclusive reference to the literatures of Asia and Afric

Intercultural Legal Sensibility as Transformation

In recent years the transformation of legal practice through globalization and shifting demographics in the United States have made the inherent cross-cultural nature of lawyering more apparent. As a result, law schools are being more intentional about the teaching of intercultural legal sensibility as part of the law school curriculum. This increased interest by U.S. law schools to train lawyers in intercultural legal sensibility calls for careful engagement by legal educators to define what intercultural legal sensibility should mean, to develop methodologies in response to the desired outcomes, and to measure their effectiveness. This article offers a reflection on what it might mean to infuse the teaching of intercultural legal sensibility with the necessary lessons to avoid perpetuating cultural dominance and global power imbalances through law. This process necessarily requires transformation on the part of all who engage globally and cross-culturally. This article explains why there may be a need for transformation and defines the type of transformation that law schools might encourage in future lawyers as part of legal education. The article also provides lessons on the methodology this type of transformational learning requires. The focus is principally on summer abroad programs as well as service learning opportunities that include student immersion in rich cross-cultural exchanges. Finally the article identifies ways to measure the effectiveness of law school programs aiming to teach intercultural legalsensibility by drawing lessons from what other disciplines have done in similar programs for at least half a century