1,721,807 research outputs found
Translating gender, transgender and identity. The case of NatGeo
No full textThe investigation deals with the issue of how the notions of gender, transgender and identity are translated from English into Italian in a case study. This requires a translation of the notions of otherness and identity, which is extremely relevant if the society of the target language and culture is not yet prepared to speak about such issues, particularly when this is mediated through media discourse that plays an outstanding role in shaping public opinion and strengthening society. Maci’s analysis draws from Translation Studies with a Critical Discourse Analysis approach and a sociosemiotic analytical model investigation, with the aim of investigating the way in which the issues of gender, transgender and identity among young and adult people are dealt with in the 2017 January issue of NatGeo in its English and Italian versions. The results suggest that while in the translated text, attention has been paid to the different cultural contexts targeted, at times such attention has been overwhelmingly prudent, to such an extent that different texts have been created
All together now: Disentangling Beatles’ song titles in medical research articles
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to understand the reason(s) why Beatles’ song titles are used as titles for medical research publications. 546 article titles have been collected over a period of 57 years (1965–2022) and linguistically analysed. Titles were classified according to three different perspectives: (1) a textual perspective (level of informativeness); (2) a sentence viewpoint (information packaging and meaning); and at (3) the lexical level (degree of accessibility and referential transparency). Here we show that the Beatles' quotations have gradually augmented over the years, with a peak in 2002, and then a gradual rise up to 2021, with a preference for using compound (57.32%) and nominal (38.09%) titles. As to the way in which information is packaged, titles are primarily focus ones (62.08). Interestingly, well 75.64% titles are constructed with no specialized language, while only 5.86% titles are ‘language as mention’, that is titles with markedly non-specialized items which appear to be borrowed from the song itself and stylistically marked with the actual quotations. Our findings suggest that, by quoting a Beatles song title, the author of the publication clearly creates an attention-seeking device with startling effect. Such an approach does not appear to be dependent on a specific period of time, journal, or Beatles song. They can thus be defined as attractors
Introduction [to Gender issues: Translating and mediating languages, cultures and societies]
No full textIn recent years, the intersection between gender and translation has been intensely explored, with research in areas such as sexual identity in translation, the writing and translating of the female body, the effects of grammatical gender travelling from one language to another, the translation of misogynist texts, the theory and practice of feminist translation, the teaching of feminist issues and activism. It is also undoubtable that recently the interest in translation, gender and feminist issues has become increasingly visible. However, there is still work to be done in the field if we think about specialized language. The study of gender issues in specialized languages and LSP translation is still a research area to be explored, and even more so if we want to analyse the intersections among different languages, cultures and societies.
The starting point of this publication is that in LSP domains many studies have been devoted to the languages of law, medicine, media, tourism, advertising, arts and business but they have not fully exploited the gender perspective which can disclose new insights into the use of specialized lexicon, the role of translation, the influence of cultural aspects and social habits and values in the transmission of equality or in-equality notions. If in the realm of feminist translation studies very few studies have been devoted to LSP and interpreting studies, similarly in the area of specialized translation almost nothing has been said about gender issues. This research aims at bridging the gap existing between LSP translation and gender issues, offering a broad view of research on translation and gender/sexuality, LSP and the professional world. The purpose is to broaden the discussion on gender awareness in specialized language and translation, and to pinpoint gender issues in audiovisual translation, to analyse gendered language in the media and advertising, and last but not least, to consider gender differences reiterated through language in specific domains
Introduction [to Special Issue: (Critical Discourse Studies and the (new?) normal. Proceedings of the 9th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines conference, Bergamo, 2022]
No full textWith the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19, lockdown measures disrupted – or at least coloured – norms and practices across all areas of social life. It was therefore unsurprising that work in (Critical) Discourse Studies began to respond to these changes by examining emergent discourses in the context of new norms and reconfigured social practices. Alongside a usual focus for (C)DS on institutional and political discourse during the pandemic (e.g. Vásquez & Jaworska, 2022; Williams & Wright, 2024), work also began to consider how some of the most basic and banal aspects of social life like touching one another as part of physical greetings (Katila et al., 2020), handling physical money (Mondada et al., 2020), and buying bread (Weatherall et al., 2022) were discursively reconfigured and “[became] interactionally relevant in a pandemic world” (ibid., p. 90). The CADAAD22 conference, held at the University of Bergamo, sought to respond to this COVID-19 zeitgeist and reflect on several years of turbulence, including for (C)DS as a field. Would everything – conferences, teaching, ways of being in academia – simply go back to ‘normal’? Or would there be a ‘new normal’? What would this look like? But we also sought to provide – through the return to a somewhat ‘normal’ conference format – a space for considering how (C)DS can respond to myriad social issues as it always has. This special issue is arranged around two parts, each of which reflects just a few of the themes emerging from the conference
Norms and normalities in discourse analysis: An introduction
No full textThis volume seeks to add to the ongoing conversation around the complex relationships between norms and discourse in Discourse Studies, and to draw attention to the topically and methodologically pluralistic work that explores these relationships
Meaning-making in Web 2.0 Tourism Discourse
No full textSince holidays cannot be inspected for purchase beforehand, tourists try to minimize the gap existing between their expectations – constructed on product representation and description – and their experience by seeking as much information as possible (O’Connor et al. 2001: 333). In this quest for information, the Internet has begun to be regarded as a convenient and dynamic source of information by means of which tourists can virtually experience the holiday, thanks to the interactive multimedia sites existing on the Web (Cho/Fesenmaier 2001), characterized by networked interrelations of verbal and iconic components which meet the requirements of today’s tourist. Hence the illusion of feeling the holiday experience, before actually living it, in line with the tourist’s most optimistic expectations.
When tourism texts are uploaded on the Net, the potentialities of these multimodal relationships are further augmented. The main feature of web-texts is that their information is selected and designed to attract attention by breaking conventional reading patterns (Crystal 2006: 205), where the traditional textual organization which allows the processing of meaning seems to be lacking and is substituted with texts characterized by abundant visual information, strategically reflecting the communicative choice of the web-designer enhancing the web-user’s illusion of having total control over the verbal component of the text itself. Indeed, Web 2.0 has allowed the potential tourist to take on a central role in the textual meaning-making process: prospective tourists play an active one. They are prosumers, tourist consumers who have become producers: if with Web 1.0 potential tourists sought information about the destination on the web, and were therefore merely network consumers, with Web 2.0, they are the authors, i.e. the producers, of the very same texts they share or actively comment on via the Net.
In this presentation, we will see how the tourism industry can create successful text on social networks such as Facebook. Clearly, the interrelation between text and visuals amplifies the meaning of the conveyed message: a text made up of language alone would offer a low-dimensional representation of experience; a text comprising only images would afford a much greater display of the complexity of reality but its meaning might be non-explicit, if not ambiguous, without the verbal elements. When images and text are interwoven their very meaning goes beyond the default conventions of traditional multimodal genres (Lemke 2002: 301). Such interrelation, however, is further emphasised because of the participation of the prospective tourists in the text itself. In other words, not only do prospective clients read such texts cross-modally, as meaning is constructed through traditional reading patterns integrated by semantic associations brought up by the potentialities offered by the Net (Lemke 2002), but they also amplify meaning precisely because they take part in the text construction. Meaning-making in such texts as those analysed in this study is thus a complex process, which results from the overlapping multimodal semiotic strategies employed by prosumers rather than from a single modal reading
'Health slips as the financial crisis grips': Tensions and variations in medical discourse
No full textIt is the aim of this paper to investigate processes of change in medical discourse provoked by globalisation, the global crisis and the pressures based on rapid and competitive publishing. It also aims to explore the extent to which, if any, medical discourse globally creates and appropriates corporate thinking. In order to carry out this research, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach will be followed, drawing on Fairclough (2001, 2007)
Introduction [a Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being: Representing the Voices of Tourism - 2017]
No full textIt is the aim of the volume to give voice to the various and different perspectives in the investigation of tourism discourse into its written, spoken, and visual aspects, in the interaction between the participants involved in the tourism practices, that is the promoters of tourist destinations, on the one hand, and tourists or prospective tourists, on the other.,. In this dialogic interaction, tourism discourse, while representing and producing tourism as a global cultural industry, shows it is on the move (Thurlow/Javowski 2011). Language movement in the tourism experience is here highlighted in the various methodological approaches and viewpoints offered by the investigations gathered in this volume
Introduction [a: Communicating English in Specialised Domains. A Festschrift for Maurizio Gotti]
No full textThis volume is dedicated to Maurizio Gotti, in honour of his long and noteworthy academic career. Maurizio Gotti was the first student to graduate at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Bergamo, where he started his academic career. Here he served as Full Professor of History of the English Language and of English Language and Translation for more than two decades; he founded the internationally known research centre on specialized languages (CERLIS) and started the Linguistic Insights book series with the prestigious publishing house Peter Lang. In the course of his career he has also been assigned multiple and prestigious offices, at both national level and international level. Maurizio Gotti’s high academic profile has been reflected in his experience as a visiting professor in many universities around the world where he carried out research and teaching activities.
Maurizio Gotti’s intellectual endeavours have encompassed many knowledge domains: He has made significant contributions to multiple areas of study including specialized discourses, lexicography, history of the English language and language teaching. His work has significantly contributed to extending and expanding existing research territories in both synchronic and diachronic domains, but has also, and distinctively, contributed to establishing and defining new areas of investigation, bringing together and harmonizing methodologies and applying them to a specific range of communicative events generally grouped under the label of specialized communication, which comprises academic, economic, legal, political, medical, and tourism discourses. This wide-ranging collection brings together essays from these various fields of enquiry authored by an international group of scholars whose academic input interacts in various ways with ideas and topics introduced or extensively discussed in Maurizio Gotti's studies. The chapters have been grouped in four theme-based sections representing the main threads in Maurizio Gotti’s research, from the macro area of specialised discourse to the more specific fields of research, namely academic and legal languages. The fourth section includes contributions dealing with the history of English language, and is followed by a miscellaneous section which concludes the collection
- …
