Making Culture Relevant in Technical Translation With Dynamic Equivalence: The Case of Bilingual Instructions

One of the central tenets of technical communication research and pedagogy is user-analysis (Redish, 2010; Barnum & Redish, 2011). Technical documents conceived to be used by individuals from different backgrounds should be the product of cycles of negotiations between authors and audiences. Similarly, the idea of participatory design (Ehn, 1993; Courage & Baxter, 2005; Simonsen & Robertson, 2012) revolves around a rhetoric of collaboration and shared-authoring that involves users at all stages of product or content development. User-centered and user-participatory approaches emphasize the importance of user feedback to identify not only problems, but also possibilities that writers and designers might fail to consider. Sauer’s (1998) influential research on risk communication in the mining industry offers strong arguments in support of the idea that technical instructions and safety documentation should be developed with the help of target audiences. Knowledge on risk reduction often originates with experienced miners, hence the need to involve them in the development of safety regulations. Hart-Davidson (2013) cites Sauer’s work to point out that technical communicators should aim to become users’ advocates by using the information gathered by audience analysis to grant not only the usability but also the usefulness of documentation

Review of The Megarhetorics of Global Development. Eds. Rebecca Dingo and J. Blake Scott. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2012, 266 pp.

“Development” is an insidious word in that it often provides moral justification for aggressive neoliberal policies. When imposed from above and orchestrated by financial and corporate elites with no understanding of the real needs of ‘undeveloped’ communities, development sanctions a covert form of imperialism that relies on the world accepting the credo of free trade in primis, but also American forms of democracy, law, and governance. With the aim of questioning neoliberal orthodoxies and challenging colonial arguments (accepted as commonsense) about saving the “natives” from their backwardness, a group of scholars have joined forces in the anthology reviewed here to unravel the most typical discursive practices and the historical foundations of the rhetoric of development

Translocal Pragmatics: Operationalizing Postnational Heuristics to Locate Salient Cultural Overlap

The importance of creating projects that allow students enrolled in American universities to collaborate with students enrolled in foreign institutions cannot be overemphasized. However, for these projects to be effective in terms of learning outcomes, it is important that instructors identify the factors that either prevent or prompt fruitful collaboration across cultural boundaries. The power of cultural boundaries demands that research on intercultural communication conceptualize and measure cultural difference. Additionally, research on intercultural communication has been irrevocably altered by the pace of communication technology change that allows for rapid and rich cross-cultural communication across great distances. An understanding of culture that takes into consideration how the variety of communication technologies that Arjun Appadurai calls “technoscapes” (Appadurai, 1996) allow faster and denser interaction across all sorts of boundaries can help researchers ask questions that are relevant

THE PRAGMATICS OF REFUSING A REQUEST IN ITALIAN AND AMERICAN ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

This study falls in the area of cross-cultural pragmatics because it compares how speakers of American English and speakers of Italian refuse a request. We used a guided conversation protocol to elicit refusals to a request. The results show marked differences between the two groups. Speakers of American English tend to rely on Positive face strategies (praise, encouragement) to mitigate their refusals. In contrast, speakers of Italian tend to use Negative face strategies: lengthy explanations combined with apologies. Both groups used avoidance strategies, but speakers of American English were less likely to offer detailed explanations that require the disclosure of personal information. These findings show that pragmatic strategies to perform speech acts might vary significantly even when we compare groups from two different Western countries

A Telecollaboration Project on Giving Online Peer Feedback: Implementing a Multilateral Virtual Exchange during a Pandemic

Telecollaboration, also called virtual exchange or online intercultural exchange, is a form of collaborative learning whereby language learners in different locations engage in computer-mediated communication to complete tasks online. There is ample evidence that telecollaboration promotes the acquisition of language skills, intercultural competence, and digital literacies. Challenges faced implementing virtual exchanges include differences in time zones, learning objectives, academic calendars, and cultural attitudes. The present article describes a case of a multilateral telecollaboration project based on the facilitated dialogue model involving four institutions-two in Europe and two in the United States-that was designed to prepare students for the experience of giving online peer feedback on collaborative writing assignments. Our initial goal was to explore the challenges students would face and the benefits they would receive from a complex telecollaboration project involving multiple institutions and two task sequences: 1) input and reflection on giving and receiving peer feedback, 2) completion of the collaborative writing task to be peer reviewed. However, new challenges and opportunities emerged after the switch to emergency e-learning and remote teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. Relying upon multiple data sources-including correspondence, observations, class discussions, surveys, reflective writing, and information stored in virtual learning environments-our methods of data collection involved convenience sampling, while data analysis was predominantly descriptive. Our results demonstrate that even during a global pandemic, students and instructors face similar logistical challenges and reap similar benefits as has been reported in the literature. Yet our experience also reveals the resiliency of telecollaboration in the face of extreme disruption as well as the potential to exploit virtual exchange to develop learning strategies-such as methods for giving and receiving peer feedback-and meta-awareness of how language is used in the real-world-such as the implications of English as a lingua franca

Enhancing students' skills in technical writing and LSP translation through tele-collaboration projects: teaching students in seven nations to manage complexity in multilateral international collaboration

International audiencePartnerships involving language projects have been common, but most have paired just two nations at a time (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Flammia, 2005, 2012; Herrington, 2005, 2008; Humbley et al., 2005; Stärke-Meyerring & Andrews, 2006; Mousten et al., 2010). That changed in 2010, when universities in five nations, long involved in the Trans-Atlantic Project (TAP) began a far more complex international learning-by-doing project (Maylath et al., 2013). By 2012, universities in two more nations were added. In forming their students into cross-cultural virtual teams (CCVTs), instructors asked, how can students best learn experientially to manage complex international/interlingual technical documentation projects? During multilateral collaborations, two projects took place simultaneously: a translation-editing project and a writing-usability testing- translation project. The undertakings’ complexity was central in the students’ learning, thereby preparing students for the international, multilingual, multicultural environments in which students can be expected to operate after they graduate. Further, the projects succeeded in increasing trans-cultural and language awareness among students with little in extra funding

A new path for TAPP: reflecting on communication strategies used in ELF interactions between native and non-native speakers of English [TAPP-Virtual exchange]

When virtual exchange projects pair up L1 English speakers and ELF speakers, the first can be implicitly positioned as language experts, the second as learners. But ELF speakers are often more experienced in negotiating spoken and written communication. Are speakers of native English equally prepared to accommodate ELF speakers? This consideration inspired a project that connected students in the US with students in Italy. These students recorded spoken interactions that we analyzed to explore how the students used specific communication strategies (CS). Results show that ELF speakers efficiently used CSs, especially self-rephrasing, a key self-repair strategy based on pre-empting problems of understanding in ELF. Compared to L1 English speakers, ELF speakers proved to be more resourceful and more adept at transforming spoken communication into an act of mediation. Training in ELF did help the L1 English speakers adjust their speech, but these students need more extensive and systematic training to develop their communication skills in ELF interactions