Narratives and evidence – which stories about COVID-19 did we believe and why?

Rigorous empirical evidence is often presumed to be the most persuasive, notably in fields such as healthcare and medicine, where there are established frameworks for assessing the quality of evidence. In this post, Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker argue for the importance of narrative rationality, especially in areas where expertise is contested. Drawing on work from their forthcoming book and taking the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case, they point to how the narrative structure and context of evidence are closely related to how knowledge is communicated and adopted by different audiences

Epistemologies of evidence-based medicine:a plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities

Evidence-based medicine has been the subject of much controversy within and outside the field of medicine, with its detractors characterizing it as reductionist and authoritarian, and its proponents rejecting such characterization as a caricature of the actual practice. At the heart of this controversy is a complex linguistic and social process that cannot be illuminated by appealing to the semantics of the modifier evidence-based. The complexity lies in the nature of evidence as a basic concept that circulates in both expert and non-expert spheres of communication, supports different interpretations in different contexts, and is inherently open to contestation. We outline a new methodology that combines a social epistemological perspective with advanced methods of corpus linguistics and elements of conceptual history to investigate this and other basic concepts that underpin the practice and ethos of modern medicine. The potential of this methodology to offer new insights into controversies such as those surrounding EBM is demonstrated through a case study of the various meanings supported by evidence and based, as attested in a large electronic corpus of online material written by non-experts as well as a variety of experts in different fields, including medicine

A corpus-based study of conjunctive explicitation in Arabic translated and non-translated texts written by the same translators/authors

This study investigates clause complexing and conjunctive explicitation in a speciallycompiled corpus consisting of two sets of Arabic translations and comparable non-translatedArabic texts both produced by the same translators/authors in the domainsof history and philosophy. Focusing on certain types of conjunctive markers, thisstudy seeks to find lexico-grammatical evidence of one of the translation-specificfeatures, i.e. features typical of translated language, in these selected target texts,using both parallel and comparable corpora.Adopting a Systemic Functional approach for analyzing logico-semantic relationsbetween clauses, clause complexes and sequences in Arabic, the study examinessome causal and concessive conjunctions and conjunctive Adjuncts in Arabictranslated and non-translated texts, and contrasts these with their English counterpartswith a view to identifying recurrent patterns or trends of 'explicitation', one of thefeatures that are arguably typical of translated texts.Baker (1996) suggests a number of translation-specific features, which manifestthemselves in translated texts on lexical and syntactic levels, and seem to be typicalof translated language in general. Evidence of one such posited feature, namelyexplicitation, is sought in the selected translators' handling of structural and textualconjunctive expressions in the English source texts. Thus, the primary aim of thepresent study is twofold: to examine from a systemic functional perspectivedifferences in the patterns of instantiation of clause complexing and conjunctiverelations in English source texts, their Arabic translations and Arabic non-translationsauthored by the same translators; and to investigate whether, and to what extent, thesedifferences are attributable to explicitation as a translation-specific feature.The originality of this study stems first from its focus on Arabic, thus addressing aconspicuous gap in corpus-based research on translation-specific features, which hasso far been largely confined to Indo-European languages. Secondly, being theorydriven,and specifically embedded in a systemic functional framework, the conceptionof explicitation adopted in this study constitutes a departure from the taxonomicapproach characteristic of a large body of literature on explicitation, which is neitherinformed nor motivated by a coherent theoretical framework, with the result that itoften engenders a flat model of description and classification, with vague overlappingcategories. Confirming the findings of earlier studies on explicitation, this study hasrevealed a tendency of explicitation features to cluster in various metafunctionalenvironments, with the overall effect of reducing vagueness or complexity, avoidingambiguity, and enhancing comprehensibility through enhanced conjunctivecohesiveness, reinforcement, expanded simplification or unpacking of complexconstructions.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Narratives in and of translation

O presente artigo contesta uma das narrativas que dominam nossos discursos disciplinares e profissionais sobre tradução, isto é, a narrativa da tradução como um meio de promover paz, tolerância e compreensão ao possibilitar que a comunicação e o diálogo aconteçam. O artigo começa com um panorama teórico de algumas das características principais da narrativa e de suas dimensões a partir de sua definição no campo da teoria social. Em seguida, são trazidos exemplos do papel desempenhado pela tradução na construção de narrativas de paz e tolerância, justamente por “possibilitar” a comunicação. O artigo, por fim, argumenta que tradutores e pesquisadores de tradução devem resistir à tentação de romantizar excessivamente seu papel na sociedade e devem, em vez disso, reconhecer o fato de que participam de maneiras decisivas na promoção e circulação de discursos e narrativas de vários tipos —algumas promovem paz, outras incentivam conflitos, subjugam populações, e estabelecem justamente o tipo de ponte entre abismos linguísticos que permite que tais atrocidades ocorram.This article questions one of the narratives that dominate our disciplinary and professional discourses on translation, namely the narrative of translation as a means of promoting peace, tolerance and understanding through enabling communication and dialogue to take place. It starts with a theoretical overview of the dimensions and some of the main features of narrative, as defined in social theory. Examples of the role played by translation in constructing narratives of peace and tolerance, precisely by ‘enabling’ communication to take place, are then offered. The article ultimately argues that translators and translation scholars must resist the temptation to over-romanticize their role in society and must instead acknowledge the fact that they participate in very decisive ways in promoting and circulating narratives and discourses of various types –some promoting peace, others fuelling conflicts, subjugating entire populations and providing precisely the kind of bridging of language gaps that allow such atrocities to take place

Narrativas do Terrorismo e da Segurança: Traduções ‘Exatas’, Enquadres Suspeitos

Constructing and disseminating ‘knowledge’ about a number of communities and regions widely designated as a security threat is now a big industry. Much of this industry relies heavily on various forms of translation and, in some cases, is generated by a team of dedicated translators working on full-blown, heavily funded programmes that involve selecting, translating and distributing various types of text that emanate from Arab and Muslim countries: newspaper articles, film clips, transcripts of television shows, selected excerpts from educational material, sermons delivered in mosques. Drawing on narrative theory and using examples from institutions involved in constructing this type of knowledge, this article argues that attempts to discredit such efforts by questioning the ‘accuracy’ of individual translations miss the point. What is needed, instead, is a more nuanced understanding of the subtle devices used to generate dehumanising narratives of Arabs and Muslims through carefully planned and generously funded programmes of translation.A construção e disseminação de ‘conhecimento’ sobre comunidades e sobre regiões consideradas uma ameaça à segurança tornou-se uma grande indústria. Grande parte dessa indústria se apoia em várias formas de tradução e, em alguns casos, é gerada por uma equipe de tradutores envolvidos com programas já instituídos e financiados cujo objetivo é selecionar, traduzir e distribuir vários tipos de texto que são provenientes de países árabes e muçulmanos: artigos de jornal, clipes de filmes, transcrições de shows de televisão, excertos selecionados de material educacional, sermões nas mesquitas. Este artigo recorre à teoria narrativa e usa exemplos de instituições que constroem esse tipo de conhecimento no intuito de argumentar que são falhas as tentativas de menosprezar esses esforços pelo questionamento da ‘exatidão’ de traduções. Ao contrário, faz-se necessária uma compreensão mais detalhada dos dispositivos sutis usados para gerar narrativas desumanas dos árabes e dos muçulmanos por meio de programas de tradução com planejamento cuidadoso e com financiamentos robustos