The translation of children's literature: Ideology and cultural adaptations. Captain Underpants as a case study

The aim of this research is to explore cultural differences in the children’s publishing industry in the USA and Spain and the impact these have on translation, and to develop a case study of the translation of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series into Spanish from a cultural and linguistic perspective. The main aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate the ways in which ranges of meaning are narrowed, expanded or refracted in children’s literature translation and how they affect early readers’ understanding of the text (as more or less subversive), modelling all this as a dynamic rather than static system. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism is applied to the Captain Underpants texts to show that the translation process is a continuum, never a finalized project, which can - and does - change with time.This dissertation explores the ways in which the translator of the Captain Underpants series, Miguel Azaola, negotiates the pressures and constraints, be they political, historical, cultural, editorial, commercial, or linguistic, which are imposed upon him via ideology, commissioning editors and the publishing industry. All translations imply a certain level of manipulation of the original text, and the translation of a subversive text written for a younger audience is even more vulnerable to change, due to the existing power imbalance between adults and children and the potential of humour as a tool for undermining or reinforcing social control. The Captain Underpants books mock and challenge authority-figures and the structures of the adult world (parents, teachers, political and religious institutions). These books provide a carnivalesque context that enables children to establish a dialogue with the text through which to question societal norms that have been learnt in school and at home. This dissertation examines how humour and references to food have been translated into Spanish in this context. It also points out the dilemmas posed by retaining the original pictures in the translated text, and how the lack of a supporting cultural peritext affects not only the visual meaning of the text as a whole but also children’s reading experience and their perception of the books as cultural artefacts. Translation loss in children’s literature can be attributed to linguistic difficulties of capturing meanings or stylistic features. However, it may also reflect societal attitudes towards childhood and cultural differences. The history of publishing for children in Spain and the didactic mission of the publishing house (El Barco de Vapor) have had a strong impact on the translation of this series. Examples of the manifestation of this impact include domesticated names, loss of word-play, discrepancies between pictures and texts, and the almost complete deletion of the dual readership (adult and child). Translation has diminished the potential subversive elements of the target text, resulting in a significant reduction of humour. By adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, in which theories from children’s literature, translation studies, reader response and studies on recent Spanish publishing trends are integrated, this thesis aims to make a scholarly contribution to the hitherto neglected study of the translation of contemporary children’s literature into Spanish. Highlighting throughout the differences in the textual content and children’s responses to the translated texts, this thesis explores the editor’s and translator’s decision-making processes and the challenges posed by translation for younger readers

Telling pain: a study of the linguistic encoding of the experiences of chronic pain and illness through the lexicogrammar of Italian

PhDSince the publication of Halliday (1988) a number of studies on the linguistic encoding of pain have appeared. These include Lascaratou (2003; 2007) on Greek, Hori (2006) on Japanese, Overlach (2008) on German. Using Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), this thesis adds another language to the existing body of work on how physical pain gets encoded crosslinguistically. The empirical work undertaken comprises the analysis of an original corpus of interviews with seven Italian speakers living with one of three chronic conditions: Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), and Spinal Disc Herniation (SDH). This thesis shows the multiple ways in which the lexicogrammar of Italian encodes bodily pain as THING, (nominally), HAPPENING (through verbs), and as QUALITY of something (adjectivally). The analysis shows that speakers in the corpus favour the first type of encoding and suggests why this might be the case. From pain itself, the scope of the analysis broadens to include the lived experience of physical pain related to chronic illness by looking at the informants’ use of evaluative language. This is analysed by means of Appraisal Theory (Martin and Rose, 2003; Martin, 2005; Martin and White, 2005), which identifies three attitudes encoded through the system of appraisal. These are: affect (the speaker’s feelings and emotive responses, appreciation (the evaluation of things and events), and judgement (evaluations of people’s behaviour). The analysis shows the most frequently encoded attitude is affect, with a tendency to favour indirect over direct encodings. It is suggested that this is because of a desire to avoid coming across as over emotional and therefore unreliable, a sentiment rooted in the informants’ experiences of having their symptoms and conditions doubted in the past, even in medical encounters. A broad narrative analysis approach is then used to explore the types of identities that are constructed and presented by the informants. The notion of agency is used to critique the commonly-held view of chronic illness and pain as completely disempowering. The analysis shows that – within the same individual – feelings of powerlessness coexist, in a fluid state, with notions of heightened agency. My informants work towards preserving a pre-illness identity where contradictions and paradoxes are harmonised through language.Bursary from Queen Mary, University of Londo

The social life of placebos: proximate and evolutionary mechanisms of biocultural interactions in Asante medical encounters

The Social Life of Placebos is an interdisciplinary study of the evolution of placebogenic responses – beneficial ones activated by psychosocial triggers -- and their elicitation in Asante medical contexts. Based on an extensive literature review in social, cultural, and medical studies and over 26 months of intensive research in rural Ghana, West Africa, it examines the therapeutic efficacy of Asante medical encounters by analyzing rites of care-giving within an evolutionary framework. Section 1 investigates why evolutionary processes appear to have made human physiology susceptible to psychosocial manipulation, what the health consequences of that susceptibility are in modern environments, and how culturally specific expectations and healing rituals might dampen or amplify that susceptibility. Because of key transitions in human evolution, the fitness consequences of sociality have increased rapidly and created the conditions whereby endogenous mechanisms have become responsive to sociocultural conditions. This explanation helps us better understand why culturally specific rituals can elicit powerful beneficial (placebo) and adverse (nocebo) physiological responses. Using a mixed methodology of physiological data and ethnographic case studies collected from hundreds of Asante medical encounters, Section 2 illuminates evolutionary and proximate processes in Asante contexts of care-giving and healing rituals in detailed chapters on pain, emotion, and stress. It examines the social and cultural resources and techniques that Asante health practitioners rely on for pain management in contexts where no pain medication is available. It analyzes the biocultural interactions that can take place when healers modify patient perceptions, emotions, and expectations. The dissertation concludes with biometric evidence that Asante indigenous ritual healing ceremonies actually promote significant entrainment and relaxation effects

Chinese elements : a bridge of the integration between Chinese -English translation and linguaculture transnational mobility

[Abstract] As the popularity of Chinese elements in the innovation of the translation part in Chinese CET, we realized that Chinese elements have become a bridge between linguaculture transnational mobility and Chinese-English translation.So, Chinese students translation skills should be critically improved; for example, on their understanding about Chinese culture, especially the meaning of Chinese culture. Five important secrets of skillful translation are introduced to improve students’ translation skills

Gendered discourses and discursive strategies employed in Twitter-hashtagged debates about Saudi-women’s issues

This study is motivated by Twitter’s growing popularity as a space where Saudi men and women discuss issues pertaining to their lives without being stigmatised in an otherwise gender-segregated society. It aims to shed light on the multiple perspectives adopted by them to reveal an existing tension between tradition and modernity in SA (Yamani, 2000). Adopting an eclectic qualitative method, I draw from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) tools to analyse the constellation of discourses that are related to gender and the discursive strategies used as resources for stance taking in a corpus of 1000 unique text-based tweets derived from two selected topical hashtags collected in June, 2015. These two hashtags mark the public reaction to a) newly-announced travel controls for Saudi women and b) statistics about the percentages of unmarried Saudi women. in. The data provides evidence that voices of difference, protest, and dissent regarding women’s rights and their social role are in a dialogic relation with dominant conservative discourses. The analysis reveals that hashtag contributors mainly engage in the evaluation of gendered discourses, epitomised by a predominant Discourse of Patriarchy, and a Discourse of Gender Equality and Human Rights. A Discourse of Patriarchy manifests in two mutually-supporting discourses: a discourse of dominance that privileges men and gives them control over women, and a discourse about the subordination of women. The Discourse of Gender Equality discusses women’s retrieval of their full citizenship status, without the need for guardianship, and an equal social respect for their life choices, including those related to marriage and mobility. While drawing on these discourses, contributors position themselves on a spectrum of conservative (anti-change) and progressive (pro-change) stances. By way of critiquing them, and sometimes, constructing new democratic social worldviews, the contributors show signs of engaging in a form of linguistic intervention to promote social change. Invocations of these discourses were manipulated for the macro-functions of perpetuating, undermining, or transforming existing discriminatory practices against women. Within these macro-strategies, other meso-discursive strategies were employed, namely referential and predicational strategies, assimilation and differentiation, legitimation and delegitimation, intensification and mitigation, and humour. These meso-strategies were fulfilled drawing on linguistic and semantic means including sarcasm, laughter, mock suggestions, comparison, metaphors, etc. I argue that the identified patterns found in the Twitter data reflect as well as facilitate (on the discursive level) an ongoing gradual social change in the Saudi society since the unheard can now be heard and the dominant social practices involving women are being presented for public deliberation. In addition to contributing to the Arabic literature on discourse and gender, this study engages in an act of historicising these changes in SA and provides an assessment of the transformative potential of Twitter

Radiation Sounds

Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to the United States’ nuclear weapons testing on their homeland, showing how Marshallese singing practices make heard the harmful effects of US nuclear violence

Persuasion in Public Discourse

This book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee’s intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English, Czech, Spanish, Slovene, Russian, and Hungarian) are grounded in the frameworks of functional grammar, facework and rapport management, classical rhetoric studies and multimodal discourse analysis and are linked to the constructs of (re)framing, conceptual metaphor and blending, mental space and viewpoint. In addition to traditional genres such as political speeches, news reporting, and advertising, the book also studies texts that examine book reviews, medieval medical recipes, public complaints or anonymous viral videos. Apart from discourse analysts, pragmaticians and cognitive linguists, this book will appeal to cognitive musicologists, semioticians, historical linguists and scholars of related disciplines