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After a brief survey of ideas about synesthesia in philosophy, science and the arts, this paper explores the common qualities of the parameters of colour, graphic shape (including typography), timbre and texture, hypothesizes a number of points of correspondence and argues for their semiotic importance in the contemporary multimodal communication of identity.

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Brand names are assets in marketing: a good name can help to sell products. Although research has made several recommendations on how “good” brand names should be created, the complex process is not easily adapted to every product category. Little research is done on a particular product category: the brand names of vaccines. This paper contributes to vaccine brand names in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The theoretical part of the paper first describes the characteristics of “good” and “bad” brand names, and then the focus is narrowed down to the characteristics of drug brand names and to the processes that influenced the naming of coronavirus vaccines. In the empirical part of the paper, Hungarian students perform brand recognition, recall, and association tasks connected to vaccine brand names. It will be shown that the vaccines are known by their public brand names (e.g., Pfizer) and not by their actual brand names (e.g., Comirnaty). The rating of the brand names shows that public brand names are considered to be better than the actual brand names, while brand associations collected for the actual brand names show mixed results. In the last part of the paper, theoretical implications are discussed, and recommendations for pharmaceutical companies are formulated to show what steps these companies could take to overcome the impasse between public and actual brand names.

Controversial cartoons appearing in contemporary news and social media are periodically denounced by consumers for hate speech, and argued over in blogs, reader comments and news articles. Visual and verbal discourse analysts could contribute useful insights to such debates and to awareness raising programmes for addressing hate speech issues in cartoons, but to date have produced little work on the topic. This paper addresses the difficult question of how we distinguish between legitimate satire and hate speech in controversial cartoons about real events featuring public figures belonging to groups with a history of discrimination. The paper proposes that key considerations in this endeavour are the distinction between conceptual and narrative representations and the relevant participant role(s) assigned to the public figure in question (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006). The latter’s construal as being, doing or undergoing in the visual structure constrains the options for their evaluation. The evaluations are analysed using visual analogues of the verbal appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005; Economou, 2009; Swain 2012; White, 2014). It is argued that negative evaluations based on representations of the public figure’s real-life behaviour may more plausibly pass for legitimate satire, whereas those based on the public figure’s appearance alone may be more susceptible to a hate speech interpretation.

Understood as reasons and rationale given by courts in rendering their decisions (DiMatteo 2015; Gudowski 2015), justification is of great importance when resolving morally sensitive issues. In such cases, judges are tasked with finding solutions to fundamental conflicts of incommensurable constitutional principles, which are inherently open-ended, general and in need of interpretation. Constitutional courts rely on different models of constitutional review depending on a given legal system and culture. However, their overarching goal is to consider ways of resolving conflicts and their justifications arising from a clash between constitutionally protected rights and interests and other values deemed worthy of protection by legislatures. The question addressed in this paper is how a constitutional court can resolve conflicts and communicate motives behind its decision in morally sensitive issues and how evaluative language is instrumental in achieving this strategic goal. Two cases are compared in which judges resolve a conflict between freedom to exercise religion and the animal welfare. In Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the US Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of animal sacrifice for religious purposes. In Poland, the Constitutional Tribunal in its decision (K52/13) ruled for the admissibility of ritual slaughter. Adopting the methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), this paper demonstrates that while the argumentation in the Polish decision is heavily axiological, with Polish judges using value-based language to engage in fundamental values and principles, the US Supreme Court judges avoid broad, abstract reasoning by resting the argumentation on low-level and medium-level principles (Sunstein 2018) translated into concrete rules and standards.

Developers of generative artificial intelligence systems promote the idea of personal assistants for various tasks, including translation and authoring creative content. As a consequence of these developments, the topic of “human” creativity has moved centre stage. Acknowledging similarities between translation and creative writing, this article offers a critical discussion of intersecting areas and suggests a framework for creative skills couched in the tradition of social sciences research. As a practical application with pedagogical impact, the paper presents a new module on writing specifically designed for translators. As is argued, the conceptual design, content, mode of delivery and evaluation of potential pedagogical benefits may be replicable in other pedagogical settings at undergraduate or postgraduate level. The role of technology is also problematised, indicating how writing may be augmented by using tools. Ideally, this is to be done in a context where creativity upskilling can equip students with the ability to (de)select context-appropriate solutions, that is, to use convergent and divergent thinking, ultimately preparing them to play a fundamental role in a rapidly evolving digital world.

Machine Translation (MT) continues to make significant strides in quality and is increasingly adopted on a larger scale. Consequently, analyses have been redirected to more nuanced aspects, intricate phenomena, as well as potential risks that may arise from the widespread use of MT tools. Along this line, this paper offers a meticulous assessment of three commercial MT systems - Google Translate, DeepL, and Modern MT - with a specific focus on gender translation and bias. For three language pairs (English-Spanish, English-Italian, and English-French), we scrutinize the behavior of such systems at several levels of granularity and on a variety of naturally occurring gender phenomena in translation. Our study takes stock of the current state of online MT tools, by revealing significant discrepancies in the gender translation of the three systems, with each system displaying varying degrees of bias despite their overall translation quality.

The rise in cross-border business in recent decades has led to changes in corporate and working languages and a corresponding surge in research. At the same time, the field of strategic and global talent management has also developed rapidly, but to date has not included language. This paper calls for the integration of language training as a key element of strategic talent management in MNCs. A small-scale interview study with employees from three large Italian companies reveals a broad range of approaches to language and talent management, suggesting there is an urgent need for further cross-case research. The results also show that (a) while English is gaining rapidly in importance, especially at corporate/senior management levels, Italian still plays a central role in some companies; (b) language skills are perceived as bringing added value to employees and companies and can be seen as crucial to the expansion process; and (c) talent management plays an important role in attracting and retaining excellent employees but appears to still be in its infancy in Italy. We therefore argue that strategic talent management urgently needs to be better understood and implemented, and should include proactive language training.

Translation is commonly regarded as a service both in translation industry and within Translation Studies (TS), but the question of what makes translation a service has not been widely explored. This conceptual paper looks at non-literary translation as a service, applying a paradigm of Service-Dominant S-D logic (S-D logic) to the field. Practices in translation service provision are analysed using the Facilities-Transformation-Usage framework (FTU framework), designed on the premises of S-D logic, as a tool. The paper shows that translation practices in general comply with this theoretical perspective, making translation, by definition, a service, and opens a window into the aspects that make it a service. Some current practices in the field do not, however, meet the criteria of an ideal service. These practices are discussed briefly in order to pinpoint, from the service theoretical point of view, where the problems lie.

The aim of this article is to describe the strategies included in our proposal to improve employability and facilitate entrepreneurship among graduates of the Master’s Degree in Institutional Translation. Firstly, this paper takes as a starting point the survey data collected by the Technical Unit for Quality Assessment (UTC) at the University of Alicante. This data shows the evaluation done by the graduates of the Master’s Degree in Institutional Translation on the competences preparing them for graduate labour market outcomes and entrepreneurship. Secondly, it explains the different curricular and extracurricular activities, as well as elective subjects, which are either being carried out at the moment or to be implemented in the future, so that students can develop the competences that the translator’s profession requires. The paper also mentions the role played by each institutional party involved in this collaborative action and proposes measures to consolidate and further develop the initiative.

The lemma is one of the core terms in lexicography. It is the lexicographical item that users of paper dictionaries normally utilise to look for the dictionary article that can help them satisfy their information need, and lexicographers consider the lemma an essential and indispensable part of a lexicographical tool. However, as new technologies are continuously being developed and many dictionaries (or lexicographical data) are incorporated into other kinds of digital tools, e.g. writing software and e-readers, it is necessary to re-examine the notion of lemma because these changes have consequences for the definition of this term. Furthermore, research into the operative function – one of the main functions in the lexicographical function theory – has shown that the lemma should not only be associated with words, but also other types of needs than those related to linguistic signs, something which e-dictionaries more easily are able to accommodate compared to paper-based dictionaries. This contribution, therefore, re-examines the lemma and investigates its role in e-dictionaries, and it suggests a provisional definition of this core lexicographical term that is applicable in e-dictionaries and in digital tools based on lexicographical data.

This paper conducts an exploratory investigation into the use of evaluative language in the historical section of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. (2022). The investigation employs Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, adapted specifically for the analysis of the particular evaluative features of historical discourse as elaborated on, for example, by Myskow (2018a) and Oteíza & Pinuer (2013). The findings confirm that a revised version of the Appraisal framework can be fruitfully applied to systematically account for the complex interplay between, on the one hand, the various sources of evaluation, and, on the other hand, the specific attitudinal resources, employed by the authorial voice in an attempt to construe and advance a particular view of the past. This particular ideological view is ultimately leveraged to produce a convincing justificatory argument for the overruling of the two previous landmark Supreme Court decisions that had, respectively, granted and confirmed abortion as a constitutional right in the United States of America.

The most abhorred population group in Africa (and by extension in Namibia) is the LGBTQI community. Non-heterosexuality is largely condemned in most African countries for political, religious, cultural and legal reasons. Couched within Appraisal Theory, the paper examines how linguistic resources are exploited in manners that evince how homophobia is politically and legally framed in two Namibian daily newspapers – The Namibian and New Era. For example, while the world has reacted to the realities of the departure from the traditional binary definitional parameters of sexualities and sexual identities, Namibia still remains largely homophobic, together with at least 47 other African countries still criminalising homosexuality. In 2001, for example, a video documentary quotes the then President of Namibia, Dr Sam Nujoma, expressing the sentiments that “Lesbians and homosexualism, these we condemn – we reject them. In Namibia there will be no lesbian, no homosexualism” (Blecher, 2001). In August 2005, Minister of Home Affairs, Theopolina Mushelenga, publicly denounced the human rights of Namibian gays and lesbians and also asserted that “homosexuals were responsible for the HIV and AIDS pandemic” (Lorway, 2006, p. 436). Homosexuality has generally, thus, been regarded as an uncultural, unAfrican, uncommon and unacceptable phenomenon in Africa, including Namibia. In Namibia, as in other African countries, the penalty for homosexual behaviour is imprisonment. Many Namibian political leaders have publicly expressed that homosexual rights go against the legal, religious and cultural values of the country. There are political and legal imports to the rejection of homosexual behaviour patterns in Namibia as evinced in news reporting cultures. Homosexuality in Namibian political and legal discourses is largely imagined as either an ‘unAfrican’ behaviour or attributed to western influences on Africa. Linguistic expression by many Namibian politicians also evince a revulsion of homosexuality.

The present paper aims to discuss the discursive strategies of otherization, legitimation, and normalization typically found in extracts from the author’s video corpus of US Presidents’ selected official statements at the height of actual or potential armed conflicts between the First Gulf War (1990-1991) and the end of the Obama Administration (2016). The underlying working assumption is that, to consolidate asymmetrical power relationships and monitor dissent and/or win domestic consent about the use of force, the US Administration systematically resorts to a relatively restricted inventory of political myths and cultural constructs sustained by strategic storytelling and powerful master narratives, or Intertextual Thematic Formations. The qualitative analysis, informed by a systemic functional, critical discourse approach, is undertaken at both the macro- and micro-levels, with a view to highlighting how master narratives project distinct/conflicting standpoints and socio-institutional roles and identities (e.g. the-President-as-Father-of-the-Nation; the-Community-as-Protector-of-its-Members'-Interests; the-West-as-Civilizer), while feeding the myth of a ‘super-empowered’ President and ultimately sustaining the ideological square. The final contention is that awareness-raising pedagogical models are needed which work upwards from the bottom of the hierarchical narrative structure, contextualizing the master narrative and linking it to the audience’s individual narratives, so that discourse can fulfil its critical function of dismantling potentially manipulative and/or normalizing discourse practices and foster civil society-led, personal counter-narratives that remove stereotyping and oversimplification.

Recent technological changes have affected translators’ professional boundaries and status. However, scant attention has been paid to the new opportunities that have been created for professional literary translators. Our research focuses on ¡Hjckrrh!, a de facto non-profit self-publishing initiative led by three professional translators who are involved in the publishing of literary translations in ebook format – they share the same professional expertise, but assume different roles in the initiative. An ethnography-inspired qualitative method has been adopted by the researchers. This paper is based on fourteen interviews with participants who have collaborated with ¡Hjckrrh!, comprising eleven translators (including the three founding members of ¡Hjckrrh!), two proofreaders and a graphic designer. The paper aims at studying translators’ roles, production teams and relationships, and pays special attention to the agency and visibility of translators. Our findings show that technology has had a positive impact on translator agency, status and identity among the founding members and collaborators of ¡Hjckrrh!. These translators have used the shifting professional boundaries and technological advances to develop their roles as cultural mediators. The article describes the work of the translators who collaborate in this digital initiative and discusses the ways they relate to each other, the roles they play and how they cross professional boundaries. The conclusions identify the relationships and opportunities created by this new work environment.

The observable activity of translation, the series of text comprehension and text production bursts we identify as translation, is the result of the activation of complex underlying cognitive systems. In the conduct of research it is often useful to approach such complex systems using a ‘levels of explanation’ framework. This paper considers David Marr’s (1982) three levels of explanation as they might apply to understanding translation and translation expertise more robustly. In cognitive translation studies to date, we have not really extended our understanding of expertise much past the second (algorithmic/representational) level in Marr’s scheme; we have failed to grapple as effectively as we might with the problem of how the second generation computationalist expertise constructs we adopted almost twenty years ago could be integrated with, for instance, connectionist neural network models of the mind, creating a third generation of expertise models. This paper offers some frameworks laying out how that end might be achieved using, for instance, symbolic connectionism and implementational connectivism. Further, it argues that given the overtly symbolic nature of translation language processing, cognitively-oriented translation scholars are uniquely suited to benefit from approaches that bridge the divide between symbol processing models and connectionist ones.

Today technology is part and parcel of professional translation, and translation has therefore been characterised as Translator-Computer Interaction (TCI) (O’Brien 2012). Translation is increasingly carried out using Translation Memory (TM) systems which incorporate machine translation (MT), referred to as MT-assisted TM translation, and in this type of tool, translators switch between editing TM matches and post-editing MT matches. It is generally assumed that translators’ attitudes towards technology impact on this interaction with the technology. Drawing on Eagly/Chaiken’s (1995) definition of attitudes as evaluations of entities with favour or disfavour and on qualitative data from a workplace study of TCI, conducted as part of a PhD dissertation (Bundgaard 2017) and partly reported on in Bundgaard et al. (2016), this paper explores translator attitudes towards TCI in the form of MT-assisted TM translation. In doing so, the paper has a particular focus on the disfavour towards TCI expressed by translators. Moreover, inspired by Olohan (2011), who applies Pickering’s “mangle of practice” theory and analyses resistance and accommodation in TCI, the paper focuses on how translators accommodate resistances offered by the tool. The study shows that the translators express disfavour towards MT in many respects, but also acknowledge positive aspects of the technology and expect MT to play a significant role in their future working lives. The translators do not make many positive or negative comments about TM which might indicate that TM is a completely integrated part of their processes. The translators seem to have a flexible and pragmatic attitude towards TCI, adapting to the tool’s imperfections and accommodating its resistances.

The paper discusses a number of theoretical and methodological issues which arise when professional simultaneous conference interpreting (SI) is studied in light of the basic tenets of the functionalist theory of translation and interpreting (T&I) proposed by Hans J. Vermeer (skopos theory). Based on a multi-level model of SI as a professional course of action the paper applies such functionalist notions as skopos, target culture, target-textual autonomy, and “coherence” to a case study of a three-day technical conference with professional SI between English and German. In essence, it is argued that, on a general conceptual level, modelling SI in the framework of the general functionalist theory of Vermeer serves to bring into focus the crucial translational issues of situation, text, and culture. On the other hand, applying skopos-theoretical concepts to the study of a corpus of authentic professional SI reveals some limitations of the extent to which the general functionalist notions fit the specific practice of SI.

When organisations implement corporate values as a managerial tool, the Corporate Value Statement (CVS) is a central piece of corporate communication. Nevertheless, little research has been done on the linguistic aspect of the CVS in international settings. In this article, I study the case of Keolis, a French multinational corporation that empowers subsidiaries to translate and adapt the Group’s CVS to local business contexts, resulting in radically rewritten subsidiary versions. I propose a linguistic and discourse analytical approach to identify translation shifts between the headquarters’ CVS in English, and local versions in Denmark and in India. I also investigate which contextual and cultural factors may have contributed to these shifts. Findings suggest that subsidiaries use the value terms as vessels to be filled with corporate content of their choice. Contributing to a translatorial turn in international business and organisation studies, this paper illustrates how applied linguistics may inform management practice.

Commercial and creative perspectives are critical when making movies. Deciding how to select and combine elements of stories gleaned from books into multimodal texts results in films whose modes of image, words, sound and movement interact in ways that create new wholes and so, new stories, which are more than the sum of their individual parts. The Imitation Game (2014) claims to be based on a true story recorded in the seminal biography by Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). The movie, as does its primary source, endeavours to portray the crucial role of Enigma during World War Two, along with the tragic fate of a key individual, Alan Turing. The film, therefore, involves translation of at least two "true" stories, making the film a rich source of data for this paper that addresses aspects of multimodal inter-semiotic translations (MISTs). Carefully selected aspects of tales based on "true stories" are interpreted in films; however, not all interpretations possess the same degree of integrity in relation to their original source text. This paper assumes films, based on stories, are a form of MIST, whose integrity of translation needs to be assessed. The methodology employed uses a case-study approach and a "grid" framework with two key critical thinking (CT) standards: Accuracy and Significance, as well as a scale (from "low" to "high"). This paper offers a stretched and nuanced understanding of inter-semiotic translation by analysing how multimodal strategies are employed by communication interpretants.

This paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach to analyse how meanings are produced and circulated in British major corporate digital media outlets via the multimodal notion of transduction (Kress 1997; Mavers 2011; Newfi eld 2014). Transduction is a form of translation from one semiotic system to another one, for example from verbal language to images and vice versa. However, transductions cannot be interpreted as mere transferrals from one resource to another one, and are here interpreted as multiplying meanings (Lemke 2002). As a case study, this paper will select some online columns from the Telegraph and the Guardian, drawing from a monitor corpus that is under construction to date and that includes multimodal data from the British digital press reporting on the “European migrant crisis” in 2015. The columns selected for this study deal with how people on the move are and/or should be labelled (e.g. Migrants? Refugees? Asylum seekers? Potential terrorists? See Gabrielatos, Baker 2008; Baker et al. 2008). The columns will be commented qualitatively from a multimodal critical discourse framework of analysis, with the goal of shedding light on how pictorial materials (e.g. pictures and diagrams) can amplify, reduce or even contradict what is argued in the verbal text. In the conclusive remarks, some refl ections will be presented with a view to possible future lines of research.

Teaching web-based communication involves website analysis, website design and webcopy writing, often in multiple languages for different target audiences. Localization and foreign language webcopy writing require training in the area of translation, in addition to other skills related to web communication. Such training might be didactically supported with peer-feedback assignments. Surprisingly few studies in the area of localization/translation and web-based communication report about classroom practice of this kind. Drawing on theory from Educational Psychology, Writing Research in L2 and Translation Studies, this paper explores common notions in peer-feedback research. It discusses peer-feedback and its implementation as a translation training tool in the context of web-based communication with a focus on localization as a form of text production. Student feedback and the revisions performed on its basis are investigated. The data reported here derive from an undergraduate web-based communication course, where students produced a translation and an academic translation review. The paper discusses possible future peer-feedback practices, including suggestions for feedback scaffolding tailored to the needs of future language professionals in the area of web-based communication.

Being concerned with (what has hitherto been) a marginal and under-researched area of Translation Studies, viz. intralingual translation, this paper focuses on the particular type of monolingual rewriting which consists in the transformation of specialized LSP texts into a new text type aimed at lay readership. As a specific example of this type of transformation, the paper investigates the rewriting of pharmaceutical product specifications into medicinal package inserts (so-called patient information leaflets). In Translation Studies terms, in other words, the pharmaceutical texts are treated as source texts and the patient information leaflets as target texts. The paper examines certain core intralingual translation strategies employed to make the specialized information accessible to the non-expert audience. The focus is primarily on strategies employed to convert medical terminology into more lay-friendly wordings. The exact linguistic nature of these strategies is examined, and the ways in which they contribute to target-text lay-friendliness are charted.

Undoubtedly, in recent years, the world as a whole, as well as the present world of work, has seen rapid changes which have served to bring about fundamental changes to work practices. Employees and trainers are thus facing greater challenges to achieve the required competency needed in this changing workplace environment. Bhatia (2013) observes that while the analyses of legal discourse have focused largely on ‘discursive practices’, very little effort has been given to studying ‘critical performance’ in professional legal practices, which is distinct from discursive practices. For this reason, this paper aims to show why discursive output has proved insufficient in the dynamic and complex discourse world of the present day workplace, as well as how the application of Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) greatly assists our understanding of it. By using critical genre theory, this paper looks more closely at interdiscursivity in public relations (PR) involving professional communication and how this in turn results in greater understanding of the changing workplace environment of the PR profession and helps individual PR practitioners cope with the challenges that they face. To achieve these aims, this study includes (i) in-depth interviews with public relations practitioners to gain their perceptions of their daily activities and the language and communication skills required by public relations practitioners to improve their effective professional communication, and (ii) critical genre analysis of the production of PR/communication plans, in particular, the Executive Summary and the Situation Analysis Section of the plans, to show the interaction between discursive and professional practices in the “socio-pragmatic space” of public relations contexts and how interdiscursivity is built into PR genres. For example, in order to examine the appropriation of genre and genre resources, it is interesting to consider: (i) in what way the Executive Summary of the PR/communication plans satisfies the requirements of sales promotional materials, and (ii) how in a very subtle manner, promotional elements are incorporated in the Situation Analysis Section, resulting in a mixed and embedded genre and discourse, achieving a mixture of communicative purposes in the communicative context: to report and to recommend communicative actions as well as to achieve ‘private intentions’ within the context of ‘socially recognized communicative purposes’ (Bhatia 2002).

The present paper stems from a contrastive corpus-based study of phraseology in Spanish, Italian and English criminal judgments (Pontrandolfo 2013). By exploring the Corpus of Criminal Judgments (COSPE), a large comparable trilingual corpus (Spanish, Italian, English) of approximately 6 million words, the present paper aims at investigating the close relationship among specialised discourse, discourse markers and translation. The focus of the study is on special particles which play a pivotal role in judicial texts: “contrargumentative markers” (Portolés 1998, Montolío 2001) or “antioriented argumentative markers” (Escandell 2013), which, following Rudolph (1996) have been labeled “argumentative markers of contrast”. The primary objective of the paper is to carry out a quantitative analysis of the distribution of this type of discourse markers in COSPE, as well as a qualitative analysis aimed at characterising the markers uses in COSPE and identifying trends of use in judicial discourse. The secondary objective, which nevertheless guides the whole study, is to carry out a legal translation-oriented analysis. Indeed, studying discourse markers is a necessary precondition for translators, since the semantic and pragmatic relations conveyed by these particles and their distributional differences represent the guidelines for the selection of adequate translation solutions (cf. Visconti 2000, Garofalo 2006). From a methodological point of view, the study combines a qualitative approach oriented at the discourse genre (cf. Bhatia 1993, Garofalo 2009) with a more qualiquantitative approach based on corpus linguistics, more specifi cally on corpus-assisted discourse studies (Partington 2004, Partington et al. 2013).

The aim of this paper is to present the concept of dignity as a refl ective concept that may serve as a strategy for enhancing intercultural competence. Within the field of intercultural communication, intercultural competence seeks to impart essential knowledge and skills for engaging in intercultural encounters with cognitive, behavioral and affective competence. Dignity contributes to intercultural competence by enabling persons to view the social world anew. In this paper, dignity is conceptualized as the development and self-expression of persons free from social categorization, while acknowledging human vulnerability towards the social and material world. In intercultural encounters, a person may indeed sense their vulnerability due to a lack of social orientation, cultural awareness and language skills. Simultaneously, the vulnerability of the Other may be neglected with implications for effective and appropriate interaction between a Self and a culturally dissimilar Other. Accordingly, it is proposed that emotional regulation is essential for realizing dignity as an aspect of intercultural competence. Research on social dynamics and identity and the emotions is not without its precedence within intercultural communication. This project contributes to the objectives of intercultural communication and competence by theorizing how awareness of social dynamics and emotional regulation may support the realization of dignity during intercultural encounters. Dignity may complement other strategies related to cognitive, behavioral and affective competence for engaging in effective and appropriate communication.

Dictionaries of economics have evolved over time. In the past, most dictionaries were similar to glossaries and were in printed form. In this Internet era, some printed dictionaries have evolved into online dictionaries with various number of technological features. However, the evolution of these dictionaries has not taken into account the evolving needs and situations of the users. Consequently, as we can see from the review of the current online dictionaries of economics, these dictionaries have failed to satisfy the needs of the users, particularly the spoken text reception needs. This paper presents some principles in creating a future dictionary of economics that can satisfy the needs related to the situation when a non-native English speaker is listening to business news in the English language. The future dictionary or the proposed dictionary in this paper takes the concept of a lexicographical information system (LIS) that integrates several components into the dictionary. The four components discussed are a voice recognition function, a tooltip, an auto-summarize function, and a definition-finder. This paper shows why these four components are needed and how they can solve the users’ lexicographical problems correctly, promptly, and conveniently.

This is a crossroads time for dictionaries in print in general and for bilingual dictionaries of Economics in print in particular. A time when the prevalence of information technologies supposedly makes access to specialized lexicographical information easier and faster. The present study first reviews briefly the current situation of bilingual dictionaries of Economics on paper and their viability in a near future. It then examines, with more detail, the specific lexicographical issue of incorporating (i.e. translating) English financial neonyms, which appear practically everyday in print and internet media, into English-Spanish/Spanish-English Dictionaries of Economics on paper, normally published in the lapse of years. This gap between the immediacy of the Internet and the delay of printing, seems to cause serious problems to bilingual lexicographers specialized in Economics especially when questionable translations of such neonyms are already circulating on the web. This, in addition to the ample presence of electronic glossaries and dictionaries, easily accessible by translators and professionals, but whose reliability, on the other hand, is not always guaranteed. Finally, a more active role is recommended to bilingual lexicographers in Economics by taking advantage of internet information media services and by joining efforts with finance experts and professionals.

This paper surveys the economic dictionaries available on the internet, both for free and on subscription, addressed to various kinds of audiences from schoolchildren to research students and academics. The focus is not much on content, but on whether and how the possibilities opened by electronic editing and by the modes of distribution and interaction opened by the internet are exploited in the organization and presentation of the materials. The upshot is that although a number of web dictionaries have taken advantage of some of the innovations offered by the internet (in particular the possibility of regularly updating, of turning cross-references into hyperlinks, of adding links to external materials, of adding more or less complex search engines), the observation that internet lexicography has mostly produced more ef! cient dictionary without, however, fundamentally altering the traditional paper structure can be con! rmed for this particular subset of reference works. In particular, what is scarcely explored is the possibility of visualizing the relationship between entries, thus abandoning the project of the early encyclopedists right when the technology provides the means of accomplishing it.

This paper aims at discussing the main advantages that ontologies bring to the field of terminology and its users, focusing on different aspects and needs. Throughout the paper ontologies are acknowledged as a valuable resource to improve quality of terminological projects as well as the content of terminologies, but it also seems appropriate to define the concept of ontologies more precisely and to outline their benefits and limitations. To do so, we firstly discuss the multidisciplinarity of ontologies and the main recent uses within different disciplines. Secondly, we focus on terminology studies and theories and depict the evolution of this resource in the terminology field during the last decades, which has brought about the appearance of new methodologies and applications. Next, we put forward the advantages that ontologies bring to terminology in general and to several linguistic phenomena in particular (multidimensionality, for example) so as to shed some light on their importance in this field and, finally, we conclude with the discussion of significant drawbacks encountered, along with some final remarks about the use of ontologies in terminology work.

The internet has revolutionised the ways in which patients acquire medical information, a development which has clearly been welcomed by patients: seeking out health information online is now the third most popular activity after internet searches and e-mail (Timimi 2012). However, it has led to concerns about the quality of the information, the ability of lay people to understand it (Gerber/Eiser 2001) as well as potential cyberchondria (Starcevic/Berle 2013). In light of these conflicting perspectives, this paper examines one such source of online information, namely, the patient forum where patients communicate with other patients about a particular medical condition. Although doctor-patient communication in the clinical situation has been extensively researched, little is known about how patient-patient communication is managed in online situations such as patient forums. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research in that relatively un-researched area by examining how patients manage relational and informational aspects of communication in online patient forums. Whilst a typical interactional structure of the patient forum exchange is question and answer, we focus on responses to questions on patient forums. This paper reports on the findings of a thematic analysis (Braun/Clarke 2006) of an online thyroid disease patient forum, investigating how interpersonal aspects are negotiated where patients share condition-related knowledge. We identify themes that relate both to informational and relational aspects as well as themes that fit under a new category which we call ‘info-relational’ as it subsumes informational and relational elements. We discuss a number of theoretical implications, which are valuable as existing health communication models and understandings of patient expertise have yet to catch up with the effects of new media such as online patient forums.

The aim of the present paper is to make a contribution to CSR communication theory by investigating the level of substantial information provided in CSR print advertisements in the UK and Brazil. The paper evaluates CSR advertisements using textual analysis. The empirical evidence demonstrates that companies provide a low level of substantial information when advertising CSR. The paper provides empirical evidence as to the extent that corporations use substantial information in their advertisements.

The starting point of this paper is the phenomenon of so-called MediaSport, namely the pervasive and multi-faceted mediation of sports events that extends the reach and hold of the sports industry on communities of sports consumers. The specific aspect of MediaSport considered here is the streamed post-match interview with Premier League team managers, a stabilized media interaction that reflects the importance of media duties as part of the manager’s corporate brief. Critical attention to managers seems mainly confined to sociological studies of the politics of celebrity, while linguists seemingly have little to say about this kind of discourse. The data selected for analysis are two interviews following defeat. The choice falls on this scenario because it is expected it will entail a greater onus on managers to display media interaction expertise. Using a theoretical framework that draws on Goffman’s concepts of performance, participation framework, and face, the discourse analysis in this paper attempts to provide an account of the linguistic resources managers draw on in these mediated interactions. The analysis of turn-taking, topic control, deixis and modality reveals similarities in the sample interviews that suggest these encounters are actually semi-scripted collaborative performances that allow both interactants to preserve their face as competent professionals, while also affording the manager ample opportunity to interact with the major imagined recipient, namely, the online fan base.

The paper takes as its point of departure a comparison between two kinds of approaches to clause structure, namely tree analyses like the generative analysis and field analyses like the sætningsskema analysis of Danish of Diderichsen (1946) and many others (or like the topologische Modell analysis of German of Drach 1937 and many others). The particular difference between the two kinds of analyses which I explore in this paper concerns c-command, which is a relationship between different constituents in a clause. I shall try to show how useful and indispensable c-command is when it comes to accounting for negative polarity items in English, Danish and German, both the more straightforward aspects and the more complex ones, e.g. the so-called NPI-verbs as well as the interaction between NPI-elements and because-clauses.

There is wide recognition that the communication of risk in Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) – the instructions that accompany medications in Europe – problematises the reception of these texts. There is at the same time growing understanding of the mediating role of trust in risk communication. This paper aims to analyse how risk is discursively constructed in PILs, and to identify and analyse discourses that are associated with trust-generation. The corpus (nine PILs chosen from the British online PIL bank, www.medicines.org.uk) is analysed using Foucauldian (1972) discourse analysis: specifically, this involves identifying the functions of the statements that constitute the discourses. A discourse analysis of the corpus of PILs reveals that the discourse of risk revolves around statements of the potential harm that may be caused by taking the medication, whilst trust is constructed through three discourses: the discourses that relate to competence and care, in accordance with the trust theories of Poortinga/Pidgeon (2003) and Earle (2010), and a third discourse, corporate accountability, which functions to construct an ethical (trustworthy) identity for the company. This paper contributes to PIL literature in the following ways: it introduces a methodology that has not been used before in relation to these texts, namely, Foucauldian discourse analysis; it helps to identify the presence of trust-generating discourses in PILs; and analysing the discourses of risk and trust at statement-level facilitates a better understanding of how these discourses function in texts that are generally not well-received by the patients for whom they are intended.

The purpose of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand it aims to outline a new type of dictionaries, the LSP dictionary for learners, and distinguish it from other dictionary types; on the other hand the study presents the multifunctional information structure of this type of dictionary through the example of two dictionaries. First the paper examines some formerly suggested names of the new type of dictionary in three languages (Hungarian/German/English). Then the author proposes a new name (chapter 2.1.), this is followed (chapter 2.2.) by the analysis of the more specific literature on the requirements against multifunctional and user-friendly LSP dictionaries for learners (see Fuertes-Olivera (2005), Tarp (2005), and Fata (2009a)). Finally the author distinguishes this type of dictionaries from other dictionary types and gives a definition (chapter 2.3.). Since the study is based on the findings of the modern Danish functional lexicographic theory, the paper applies its concepts: in the final section of the theoretical part of the paper the author describes the possible types of users of LSP dictionaries for learners, the potential types of user situations (chapter 2.4.) and the potencial dictionary functions (chapter 2.5.). In the practical part of the study the author presents the macro-, micro- and hyperstructures chosen in relation to the given special subject field and LSP in order to make working with learners’ dictionaries easy and enjoyable for the primary target group of the dictionaries: for those who study LSP in a foreign language.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss user consultation behaviour on the basis of eye-tracking data and interview data. To date the focus has been almost exclusively on the use of log files in Internet lexicography – an approach which is questioned in this article. The paper is based on empirical data from an exploratory eye-tracking study of the user consultation behaviour of six participants and on interview data from a follow-up post-study interview of the participants. The paper elucidates and discusses the consultation behaviour in Internet lexicography and shows not only at what the participants looked, but also how they accessed lexicographic data. The paper presents a suitable method for using eye-tracking studies in Internet lexicography and advocates an increased use of this method to produce empirical data upon which additional theoretical considerations on the information and data access process can be developed. Finally, the implications for further research in user consultation behaviour are briefly explored.

This paper reports on a qualitative study focusing on the role of language awareness in university language courses that form part of English Studies (ES). Language constitutes the subject matter of students’ discipline and the ES degree is the initial training for future language teachers and other language-related professionals. Therefore, the models and views of language presented at university will influence graduates’ future professional practice. This study focuses on how language awareness is approached in language classes and on lecturers’ and students’ views of language and learning. This article will discuss how a qualitative methodology was used to find out about participants’ practices and views on language and learning, through immersion in a university language course over a term. Using a descriptive-interpretive paradigm, data were gathered from classroom observations and interviews, and analysed through the combination of ethnography and discourse analysis. This paper presents the methodological underpinnings of this research, decisions on the selection of data, interaction with participants, researcher’s stance, and warranting. Through the understanding of participants’ practices and views, this study provides a picture of how language awareness is approached in a university language course.

The present paper proposes to explore the boundaries of Teaching Through English by discussing situations where English meets other languages within the teaching and learning situation and in the surrounding environment. In contrast to the view that the English language is taking over whole areas of society in a process of domain loss, the paper shows that even within officially English medium study programmes there is a certain scope for multilingual practices. Through looking in more detail at actual language use in a range of communicative situations within the study environment, the paper seeks to build a more detailed understanding of what constitutes a sociolinguistic domain, and where its boundaries are. The paper is based on a case study of an English medium MSc programme at a Norwegian university.

Popular management literature promotes the idea that certain management styles have a reflexive relationship with certain ways of talking. Consequently, by using prescribed ways of talking, certain management styles will be achieved and that, reflexively, certain management styles favor certain ways of talking. Using conversation analysis (CA) as a research methodology, this paper compares the prescriptive language advice of popular management literature as regards facilitation with video-taped data of naturally-occurring talk in a business meeting. Findings indicate that the intuitive insights on language use offered by popular management literature ignore the indexical nature of language use whereby the ‘meaning’ of any utterance and what that utterance does depends on its context of use. In short, such popular literature may lead managers up the (linguistic) garden path and may in fact be of little help in practice. The paper ends with a call for language advice in such literature to be more descriptive and less prescriptive.

This paper offers a historical analysis of cultural identification among locals and cosmopolitans in Amsterdam, the centre of the seventeenth century world system. Here, the convergence of global processes and local changes, such as increasing monetization, commodification and anonymization of everyday lives generated conditions that contributed to the formation of modern individual and group identities. Early modern globalization gave rise to a “global animus” in Amsterdam and it prompted the city’s political elites to promote a cosmopolitan civic identity, expressed in allegoric art and architecture. On a theoretical level this paper criticizes objectifying or essentializing approaches to cultural globalization and to cultural identity and highlights instead the contradictions and ambiguities involved in the processes of attributing cultural meaning. A discussion of the poetry of Jacob Cats (1577–1660) reveals how local actors attributed contesting cultural meanings to the objects of global trade and how they acculturated them in different ways into their practices of local or cosmopolitan identification.

Multimodality is a recent academic development, fuelling a surge of related research (Kress/van Leeuwen 1996; 2001; Baldry/Thibault 2006; Royce/Bowcher 2007). In parallel to this, the turn of the millennium has seen an increase in the inclusion of typography, graphics and illustration in fiction yet, with only a few exceptions (Gibbons forthcoming a; forthcoming b), printed literature has often been neglected in multimodal study. Focusing on the ‘imagetext novel’ VAS: An Opera in Flatland, written by Steve Tomasula and designed by Stephen Farrell (2002), this paper explores multimodal printed literature through cognitive-poetic analysis. The examination of visual elements is aided by theories from visual perception and multimodal research. This cognitive and perceptual methodology is strengthened through reflection upon recent findings from neuroscientific work on embodiment. In consequence, this paper presents a fresh approach to multimodality, an approach which not only attends to all modes of meaning-making equally, as well as collaboratively, but one which considers the cognitive and embodied aspects of a multimodal literary experience.

Children’s drawings have been widely used in the field of museum education as indicators for learning, as well as means for evaluating the teaching that takes place in a museum or a heritage site. This paper employs social semiotics and multimodality as tools for introducing a different perspective when it comes to building a descriptive and an interpretative framework for analysing children’s production, as representative of their learning. The insight into their work is based on the assumptions that learning can be multi-modally mediated through a particular pedagogy and further be made accessible to us through the material realisation of children’s production across multiple modes. The paper aims to explore the implications of this position for generating knowledge about children’s learning. The main argument discussed here is that engaging with a child’s graphic ensemble through a multimodal and social semiotic perspective can enable us, hypothetically, to recover children’s meanings about the archaeological site as well as the aspects of their overall learning experience. Viewing their graphic ensembles as constructions that are interest driven and multi-modally realized could open up more possibilities for accessing the agendas and interests that guide their learning. The paper further uses this visual material as an opportunity to argue that when engaging with children’s learning, multimodality can work not as a theory on its own means, but as the framework that conditions a theory (e.g. social semiotics and discourse) into a direction of encompassing more possibilities for reading their understanding of the world.

As more and more educators try to employ interactive texts in the educational process, investigation of how knowledge communication takes place in hypertext becomes increasingly signifi cant. Drawing on a multimodal theoretical framework, this paper explores knowledge communication in interactive texts from the Volcano World website (http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Online/index.html). The analytical focus is first on how specialized knowledge is multimodally constructed inside the generic framework of traditional lessons through different types of interactive exchanges and across several semiotic modes. Second, the analysis discusses how the linear reading path imposed by the generic structure of traditional lessons is disrupted by hypertext’s meaning-making pathways. The paper concludes that the stable generic structure of lessons combined with the openness of hyperlinks can be and, to some extent, is being exploited in websites like Volcano World to enhance the process of progressively acquiring, producing and exchanging specialized knowledge across several semiotic modes. By detecting the kind of meaning-making structures that can be established when communicating specialized knowledge in a hypertext environment, educators can continuously adapt online interactive texts to accommodate students accustomed to complex interactive activities and eager to get to grips with them.

Multimodal corpus linguistics has so far been a theoretical rather than an applicative discipline. This paper sketches out proposals that attempt to bridge between these two perspectives. It does so with particular reference to the development of the conceptual and software tools required to create and concordance multimodal corpora from the applicative standpoint and as such is designed to underpin the study of texts at universities in foreign-language teaching and testing cycles. One branch of this work relates to multimedia language tests which, as illustrated in Section 2, use concordancing techniques to analyze multimodal texts in relation to students’ understanding of oral and written forms of discourse in English. Another branch is the exploration of multimodal tests concerned with the explicit assessment of students’ knowledge of the principles and/or models of textual organization of multimodal texts. The two types of test are not mutually exclusive. A third branch of research thus relates to the development of hybrid tests which, for example, combine a capacity to analyze multimodal texts with an assessment of students’ language skills, such as fluency in speaking and writing in English or which ascertain the multimodal literacy competencies of students and the differing orientations to meaning-making styles that individuals manifest. The paper considers these different applicative perspectives by describing the different categories of concordance achievable with the MCA online concordancer (Section 2) and by defining their relevance to multimodal discourse analysis (Section 3). It also illustrates the use of meaning-oriented multimodal concordances in the creation and implementation of multimodal tests (Sections 4). It concludes by suggesting that the re-interpretation of the nature and functions of concordances is long overdue and that the exploration of new types of concordance is salutary for linguistics and semiotics in general.

Starting with Werlich (1982), many researchers within text linguistics and document design see instructive texts as a category that is different from persuasive texts. Others do not include either in their main typologies (e.g. Bonnet et al. 2001). This paper will claim, however, that instructions are a particular subtype of persuasive texts: instructing people is also persuading them to do something in a particular way or in a particular situation or in a particular order. Consequently, all features characteristic of persuasion (e.g. Aristotle 4th c. BC, Bettinghaus 1968, Dacheux 1994, Whalen 1996) also appear in instructive texts. Drawing from a learner corpus of materials used in the Trans-Atlantic Tech Writing / Translation Project (Maylath et al., 2005, in press), in which Flemish students translate English instructive texts written by American students into Dutch, the paper will discuss the problems involved in the translation of two relevant persuasive characteristics of instructive texts: expertise and positive audience-orientation. For the former, attention will be paid to message form, structure and strategy, while the latter will lead to considerations of both individual interpretation differences and cultural differences.

This paper presents research findings on the use of a multilevel analytical method for the exploration of a complex text. The paper begins by describing The Difference, an advertising and instructive material of the Kodak Company, in which several semiotic modes, media, texts types and genres are functionally integrated in order to persuasively convey specialized knowledge. A presentation of the main concepts that are employed in the multilevel analysis of this complex text is also provided. Through the application of the multilevel analysis on The Difference, it is explained in detail how the instructive and argumentative discourses are actualized at the multimodal and multimedial intersection of different genres and text types. The last part of the analysis is dedicated to the presentations of the interactive connections that can be established through a multilevel analysis. The possible implications for further applications and the improvement of the method are included in the conclusions of the paper. Although it is dedicated only to the verbal mode, Virtanen’s idea of a multilevel analytical model (1992) has been employed as a starting point in the present analysis. Certainly, the model has been thoroughly expanded because, when exploring complex texts like The Difference, such a multilevel analytical model is supposed to include multimodal and multimedial dimensions.