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Within the unstable sphere of the 1950s Cold War political tensions, American women became the ‘bastion of safety in an insecure world’ (Tyler May, 2008: p.9). For politicians such as Richard Nixon, women’s loyalty to the home served as a commitment to America, negotiating a settlement which secured women within the confinements of domestic duties. This ideal, advertised through compelling magazine articles, manipulatively enabled a universal identity for women based within the home. Pages packed with the latest consumer products and laced with ‘smooth artificiality… cool glamour, and the apple-pie happy domesticity’ (Bronfen, 2004: p.115) birthed a rich propaganda for domestic containment. Examining the political climate of Cold War America through the lens of domestic containment, this article argues that American poet Sylvia Plath tackled the illusions of consumerism to fuel her writing, challenging outright gender inequality which defined the nation.Using Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (2010) alongside genuine articles from the era, this article assesses the ideological conflict of the 1950s domesticated woman against Plath’s personal battle between writing and domestic life. Through her raw depictions of realism in literature and intense poetry, it becomes impossible to ‘contain’ Plath, not only within the domestic sphere, but also in her own writing

We report on a study evaluating the educational opportunities that highly multimodal and interactive Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) provide for collaborative learning in the context of interpr...

The point of departure of this paper is an immersive (avatar-based) 3D virtual environment which was developed in the European project IVY – Interpreting in Virtual Reality – to simulate interpreting practice. Whilst this environment is the first 3D environment dedicated to interpreter-mediated communication, research in other educational contexts suggests that such environments can foster learning (Kim, Lee and Thomas 2012). The IVY 3D environment offers a range of virtual ‘locations’ (e.g. business meeting room, tourist office, doctor’s surgery) which serve as backdrops for the practice of consecutive and dialogue interpreting in business and public service contexts. The locations are populated with relevant objects and with robot-avatars who act as speakers by presenting recorded monologues and bilingual dialogues. Students, represented by their own avatars, join them to practise interpreting. This paper focuses on the development of the bilingual dialogues, which are at the heart of many interpreter-mediated business and public service encounters but which are notoriously difficult to obtain for educational purposes. Given that interpreter training institutions usually need to offer bilingual resources of comparable difficulty levels in many language combinations, ad-hoc approaches to the creation of such materials are normally ruled out. The approach outlined here was therefore to start from available corpora of spoken language that were designed with pedagogical applications in mind (Braun 2005, Kohn 2012). The paper begins by explaining how the dialogues were created and then discusses the benefits and potential shortcomings of this approach in the context of interpreter education. The main points of discussion concern (1) the level of systematicity and authenticity that can be achieved with this corpus-based approach; (2) the potential of a 3D virtual environment to increase this sense of authenticity and thus to enable students to experience the essence of dialogue interpreting in a simulated environment.

With the rise in population migration there has been an increased need for professional interpreters who can bridge language barriers and operate in a variety of fields such as business, legal, social and medical. Interpreters require specialized training to cope with the idiosyncrasies of each field and their potential clients need to be aware of professional parlance. We present ‘Project IVY’. In IVY, users can make a selection from over 30 interpreter training scenarios situated in the 3D virtual world. Users then interpret the oral interaction of two avatar actors. In addition to creating different 3D scenarios, we have developed an asset management system for the oral files and permit users (mentors of the training interpreters) to easily upload and customize the 3D environment and observe which scenario is being used by a student. In this article we present the design and development of the IVY Virtual Environment and the asset management system. Finally we make discussion over our plans for further development.

As international businesses adopt social media and virtual worlds as mediums for conducting international business, so there is an increasing need for interpreters who can bridge the language barriers, and work within these new spheres. The recent rise in migration (within the EU) has also increased the need for professional interpreters in business, legal, medical and other settings. Project IVY attempts to provide bespoke 3D virtual environments that are tailor made to train interpreters to work in the new digital environments, responding to this increased demand. In this paper we present the design and development of the IVY Virtual Environment. We present past and current design strategies, our implementation progress and our future plans for further development. © 2012 IEEE.

Slater Catherine. Note critique sur l'origine de « defaitisme » et « defaitiste ». In: Mots, n°1, octobre 1980. Saussure, Zipf, Lagado, des methodes, des calculs, des doutes et le vocabulaire de quelques textes politiques. pp. 213-217.