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The paper is dedicated to the Western reception of Narod na vojne (People at war) written by the little-known Russian writer Sof'ja Fedorčenko. Although it was published first as supposedly authentic reports of soldiers (1917, Kiev), Fedorčenko later claimed it to be one of her own artificial works. This paper focuses on a comparative analysis of three translations of Narod na vojne and transformations, which take place by means of the paratexts and the reorganisation of the fragmentary text. The English translation Ivan speaks (1919, Boston) emphasize an anti-war message, the German translation Der Russe redet (1922, Munich) accentuates a supposed ‘Russian character’ and the French one Le peuple à la guerre (1930, Paris) directs attention to the Russian Revolution.

This paper will discuss the Wiindigo, a cannibalistic character among some Indigenous peoples of North America. Illustrated through the Anishinaabeg and Oji-Cree, two Algonquin-speaking Indigenous groups, the Wiindigo serves as a personification of fear and hunger, and alludes to the cultural heritage elements of the boreal forest food system as well as the differing legal systems in Canada. In examining the Wiindigo from the Indigenous cultural and historical perspectives related to the author by several knowledge-holders, as well as from EuroCanadian popular culture representations, the paper illustrates the importance of the Wiindigo to Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree world views, customary governance, and contemporary lived experience.

The aim of this paper is to present a profile of literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), who lived on the borderland of three cultures: Polish, Jewish, and German. The paper attempts to reconstruct the main phases of Reich-Ranicki’s life in Poland, including an analysis of the critic’s interests and opinions about Polish literature, as well as his concept of a ‘spiritual homeland’. The status of M. Reich is studied in relation to the category of the alien commonly encountered in the discourse of the humanities. Reich’s strangeness is presented in three dimensions: space, culture and mentality. The paper also proves that it was the trauma of the Holocaust that had exerted the major impact on Reich-Ranicki’s personal memories and accounts.

Culture-bound references receive considerable attention from translation scholars, as they are regarded as one of the most difficult challenges that translators face. However, most studies examine the transmission of culture-bound references to the target audience in literary texts, while research that would examine the translation of culture-bound references in audiovisual discourse involving additional constraints is somewhat limited. Dubbing is considered to be one of the most challenging modes of audiovisual translation, mainly due to the synchronization applied to it. This paper presents a model for the analysis of the translation of culture-bound references dedicated specifically to dubbing. The authors of the paper discuss the complexity of the concept of culture-bound references, their categorization and the taxonomies of their translation procedures. The article discusses the specifics of dubbing, the typology of synchronies applied in dubbing and restrictions posed by it on the translation of culture-bound references.

The present paper focuses on one of the main features of legal communication, namely informativeness. The article presents the informativeness of Polish legislative documents as an inherent but not always clearly understood socially feature of legal discourse, which has been regarded as a distinctive characteristic of normative acts. The study includes several levels of approximate semiotisation in relation to the cognitive criterion. The corpus comprises the most important Polish normative texts, namely the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, Criminal Code, Civil Code, and the Code of Civil Procedure. The analysis also included rulings of Polish common courts. Pragmatic and semantic criterion has been applied as the methodological basis for the analysis. The factor related to the use of legislative metaphors in executive and judicial practice was applied as an additional criterion. The aim of the paper was to determine the form of informativeness of the Polish legal texts and its extra-textual usefulness. Two levels of informativeness of legal texts, surface level and deep level, were established in the analysis. In legal discourse, informativeness took the form of a specific phenomenon. It referred not only to surface structures, but also to the elements of the content, requiring reconstruction from their meaning.

The paper deals with the broad concept of strangeness in the literary work of Anna Mitgutsch, a contemporary Austrian writer. The topic of strangeness is a keynote in her rich literary output. Mitgutsch’s experience of being abroad (travelling to the Middle East and south-east Asia, living and working in Israel, England, Korea and The USA) is refl ected in such novels as Das andere Gesicht, In fremden Städten or Abschied von Jerusalem. Her characters are nomads, people looking for identity and homeland, trying to escape alienation. The feeling of being a stranger is also present in their relations with the loved ones. The paper provides an analysis of the images of strangeness in Die Züchtigung (1985) and Die Annäherung (2016).

This paper aims to analyse The Legend of the Great Inquisitor from a perspective of genre used by an author – Ivan Karamazov. The Legend can be referred to as fantasy (an anti-utopia). Taking into consideration the ideal of Inquisitor and the particular pieces of the text, one may state that the poem constitutes the prototype of anti-utopian narration. Having employed the notions of agent and patiens, we endeavour to sketch out the general scheme of such narration. The second part of the paper focuses on a few anti-utopias (Brave New World by A. Huxley, Matrix by the Wachowski Brothers, Futu.re by D. Glukhovsky) and aims to identify there the elements which correspond to the particular schemes.

Feature film as an educational tool in developing multicultural communication skills: The issue of the Turkish minority in Germany The goal of this paper is to stress the increasing importance of multicultural aspects in language education. Acquisition and development of multicultural competence must be a natural component of language teaching. This paper focuses on multiculturalism in German‑speaking countries, especially on the Turkish minority in Germany. It aims at finding an answer to the question how the plot of a feature movie may be used not only as language training material, but also as a source of culture specific information about a multicultural community.

Romanticism, Realism and Translator’s Dilemmas in the World of Phantasy and Horror The paper presents an analysis of several translations of two classic short stories from the Romantic era: The Golden Pot (Der goldne Topf) by E.T.A Hoffmann and The Viy (Vij) by Nicolai Gogol. The stories display many similarities as to their motifs and formal features: both main heroes, young students, encounter mysterious women equipped with magical powers; both have to struggle against mystic, daemonic creatures; furthermore, both of them balance on the verge of reality and a fantastic world populated by magic creatures. The coexistence of a realistic and an imaginary level in Gogol’s and Hoffmann’s texts poses a challenge for translators. One of them is the choice of equivalents of words and phrases referring to geographically, temporally and culturally specific objects anchored in the reality of Germany and Ukraine in the 19th century; furthermore, a careful translation strategy is needed in order to render the magic atmosphere of the supernatural world created by the author’s imagination, but inspired by local mythology. The paper analyzes and compares strategies and techniques employed in translations of the German novella into Russian, the Russian one into German, and in Polish and English versions of both stories.

The article aims to outline the role of literary periodicals in the social system of literature from a perspective of processes that take part in the accumulation of both cultural capital and social capital. In this sense, the paper is an attempt to incorporate a sociological perspective into the theory of literature in order to provide a more informed view on social and cultural processes that are mediated by literary periodicals of diversified kind. By referring to the notions of embodied and institutional cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu) as well as social capital (Robert D. Putnam, Francis Fukuyama), the paper examines the dialectic of system reproduction and morphogenetic change in terms of processes that organize the functioning of literature conceived of a specific kind of social system.