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The motivation letter is a promotional genre often requested for acceptance into post-graduate programs in Mexico. Even though universities and research centers provide some guidelines for its preparation, there is not a clear description of this genre's textual structure or of its pragmatic features. Given this situation, we developed a qualitative research study which aimed to describe the rhetorical movements and the use of intensification and attenuation mechanisms deployed by applicants to two post-graduate programs of two universities in Mexico in 30 motivation letters written in Spanish language. For the analysis, we used the ATLAS.ti 9 software. Findings show that four rhetorical movements characterize this genre, namely, (a) to explicitly state the reasons for applying, (b) to present the applicant's objectives, (c) to persuade the reader, and (d), to express future expectations. Meanwhile, intensification appears to be more common than attenuation, suggesting that the applicants strive to build a valuable self-image for the selection committee while keeping some degree of modesty, given the asymmetry in the reviewer-applicant relationship. This study highlights the importance of integrating this genre and its discursive features in the teaching of academic writing at universities, acknowledging the discursive characteristics of each disciplinary community.

The notion of francophonie still raises many questions in various fields, such as the didactic, economic, political, and media fields, among others, making it difficult to understand the concept. In this article, we analyze the ways in which the discursive contours of the francophone issue and its representation in the discourse of the Colombian print media are defined, based on a corpus of 35 journalistic articles. To this end, we combined textometric analyses obtained with the Iramuteq® software with linguistic discourse analysis tools, in order to propose an interpretative hypothesis. On this basis, we were able to demonstrate that, in the Colombian print media, the issue of francophonie is mainly elaborated on the basis of its relationship to the French language and, more concretely, on the basis of its pragmatic aim, which configures a discursive register of education and work. In addition, there is a quest linked to the desire for social mobility, where language takes on the role of auxiliary, even in the absence of cultural, social, political or historical dimensions. From this point of view, its learning and its use are reduced to a rather technical and individual subject without considering its complex character also constituting the social.

The Aymara language (AL) is one of the most important languages in the central Andean region. However, there are few studies on its use from a microsociolinguistic approach. This paper aims to analyze the use of the Aymara language in six commercial speech events in a tri-border context involving Aymara speakers from Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The conversations that happened within these events were collected through audio recordings and written records in a qualitative ethnographic intervention in the so-called three-part fair or “Feria Tripartita” (FT), a commercial event that occurs weekly in the three-border area. The analysis is based on ethnography of communication, conversational analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. Drawing on this analytical framework, the use of the AL that is manifested there shows code-switching with Spanish, both inter- and intra-orally, along with a series of interlinguistic phenomena, such as the presence of a series of Spanish lexical bases with Aymara suffixation, and the use of unnecessary Spanish loans. Thus the FT, in spite of being an Aymara space that conforms a bilingual speaking community, is a space of influence of the Castilian language, which structurally affects the use of the AL.

En la construcción discursiva de la causalidad confluye el uso de una serie de recursos que van mucho más allá de los denominados “conectores causales” en la tradición lingüística española. Estudios en español han mostrado que la conexión puede realizarse implícita y explícitamente a través de diversas configuraciones. Algunas de estas configuraciones, además de realizar conexión, implican determinados posicionamientos interpersonales. El objetivo de este artículo es caracterizar la interacción entre los significados de conexión y significados interpersonales en la construcción de la causalidad histórica. Para ello, se analizan las secuencias causales en fragmentos provenientes de un texto escolar chileno de Historia para tercer año de enseñanza secundaria, desde una perspectiva semántico-discursiva utilizando la lingüística sistémico-funcional. El análisis de las secuencias permite observar que el sistema de conexión interactúa con los subsistemas interpersonales de compromiso y gradación. En relación con el subsistema de compromiso, las conexiones realizadas verbalmente (p. ej. A permitió B) juegan un rol en el cierre o apertura del espacio dialógico. Respecto del subsistema de gradación, las mismas conexiones permiten agudizar o suavizar la actualización de la conexión causal. Desde una mirada multifuncional del lenguaje, se concluye que la construcción de la causalidad genera ensambles con significados lógicos e interpersonales que son relevantes en la interpretación del pasado.

El presente artículo busca determinar las características de las traducciones realizadas por mujeres en la prensa chilena, debido a la inexistencia de registros sobre la actividad traductora en publicaciones periódicas. Para esto, se efectuó un análisis comparativo descriptivo de dos revistas publicadas por el diario El Mercurio, la Revista Valparaíso (1873-1874) y La Mujer (1877). Luego se contrastó la información obtenida con los datos ofrecidos por el libro Biblioteca chilena de traductores, y se elaboró una base de datos que especificara traductoras, traducciones, año de la publicación y género. Los resultados muestran variables sociocontextuales del momento de producción, como las fuentes desde las que se traducía, el idioma, las áreas temáticas y las funciones que cumplían las traducciones en las revistas. También, develan un cambio en las áreas temáticas que se traducen, ya que se observa cómo la religión y la literatura fueron desplazadas por textos de opinión y divulgación, y la función patriótica o pedagógica se sustituyó por funciones de divulgación y de formación. Esta última función configura las revistas como un campo de acción preliterario utilizado por las mujeres para desplegar su agencia social e insertarse en el campo intelectual. Los datos arrojados sirven de base para realizar otros estudios comparativos descriptivos y caracterizar las traducciones que eran realizadas por mujeres en la prensa chilena.

En América Latina, se han desarrollado iniciativas institucionales e investigaciones centradas en la formación de escritores en asignaturas disciplinares y profesionales. Sin embargo, se requieren estudios que exploren las relaciones entre la escritura y experiencias formativas en entornos reales, como las prácticas preprofesionales, las profesionales y las pasantías. Este artículo presenta los resultados emergentes de un proyecto de investigación cualitativa que indagó sobre los aprendizajes asociados a las experiencias formativas en dichos entornos de estudiantes de pregrado. El análisis se hizo desde la perspectiva de los estudiantes y de otros actores asociados con las prácticas preprofesionales, profesionales y pasantías como los directivos académicos, los coordinadores, los profesores, y los asesores. El estudio fue llevado a cabo en cuatro programas de una universidad privada colombiana y se basó en cuestionarios y entrevistas, realizadas a los diferentes actores. El análisis muestra que el acceso, el uso y la producción de géneros discursivos con finalidades sociohumanísticas, académicas, profesionales o laborales forman parte de los aprendizajes asociados a dichas experiencias. Por eso, los resultados sugieren que los defensores de la alfabetización académica tienen una oportunidad pedagógica para acompañar las prácticas preprofesionales, profesionales y pasantías, con el fin de potenciar la reutilización de conocimientos especialmente relacionados con la escritura.

This article analyzes interaction taking place in an after-school digital storytelling project, involving a group of teenagers in Catalonia, Spain, with different lingua-cultural backgrounds. It focuses on intercultural mediation activities carried out in one of the early project sessions in which a young girl of Ghanaian origin mobilizes her previous life experience to mediate, for her local peers in Catalonia, understanding of a video produced by Ugandan youth. The data is transcribed and analyzed using a multimodal conversation analytic perspective. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of intercultural mediation, cosmopolitanism, and funds of knowledge, this article investigates the following: (a) how the girl mobilizes her funds of knowledge to mediate the content of the video and the other audience members and, (b) how cosmopolitanism is developed in intercultural mediation. The article also touches on how intercultural mediation is collaboratively constructed across modes, languages, and material objects. The findings indicate that the young participants’ cosmopolitan stances are enacted and enabled in intercultural mediation, as the youngsters can make sense of cultural concepts that they can not tackle as well on their own. The findings further help to reconceptualize the competences, knowledge, and resources of youth in the superdiverse and interconnected world.

Audio description (AD) is a type of accessible translation consisting of a process of intersemiotic translations from images into words. Its objective is, mainly, allowing people with visual disabilities to create a mental image of the things they cannot perceive visually. In this study, we will address a type of AD that has not been explored in academic and professional contexts: church AD, where the source text is the church, understood to be the architectonic structure used for Christian worship. Our aim is to provide a basis for the study and practice of church AD. To this end, we propose three approaches: functional and contextual, semiotic and normative. The first approach describes the different ways in which churches are used today and the context in which the audio described text is produced. The second helps to identify the visual keys that form the church's meaning and to guide the audio describer in selecting translatable information. The last one provides AD guidelines or strategies that can be applied to the submodality of AD analyzed.

When entering the job market, prospective translators face certain difficulties concerning professional know-how that they have to overcome in order to succeed in their career. For this reason, the aim of this article is to provide insights into the main concerns of future translators regarding professional competences. To understand these concerns, a corpus was created using the questions posted by future translators in a forum located on a very well-known translation site: Proz.com. A total of 125 posts were processed and thematically coded using the corpus manager Sketch Engine. The thematic codes were based on two multi-componential models of translator competence: PACTE’s and EMT Board’s models. Once the content was coded, qualitative content analysis was carried out in order to analyse the main concerns of translators-to-be in relation to professional competences. Results show that marketing, industry, and business knowledge are among the main causes of worry of prospective translators. Although the results are not generalisable, the conclusions drawn from this study provide translator trainers with a comprehensive view of what professional competences should be reinforced in the classroom.

Today’s classrooms are linguistically diverse. Nonetheless, English language teaching still uses a separatist model in which other languages and identities are reduced and subalternized. This evident separation of languages has forced many English speakers to identify with the non-native label, prevented them from using the linguistic resources they have previously acquired from other languages to communicate and learn in given settings, and made the different ways they exist invisible. From a narrative perspective, this article documents how two English teacher educators do not conform to this native ideology by resorting to a translanguaging pedagogy. It narrates their pedagogical experiences and insights preparing English teachers in Colombia and explores how they use their linguistic repertoire as a mechanism to teach. Their narratives reveal that translanguaging is a pedagogy that allows English teachers to challenge discourses framed in monolingual perspectives. They also indicate that by implementing a translanguaging pedagogy, English teachers can foster and enact a counter-nonnative ideology that enables them to reclaim their identities. All in all, the results of this inquiry suggest that it is worth pursuing translanguaging as a language pedagogy that disrupts colonial language practices and identity discourses.

Textual genres in the field of Administration can be difficult to write for both university students and public administration employees, since they call for specific linguistic characteristics, which vary according to the genre and the recipient. This article gathers the results of an empirical study examining the perception of writing administrative textual genres for the general public among two groups in the academic and professional fields. The participating groups were made up of students enrolled at a Spanish state university and the staff of a local administration of reference. Data were based on a quantitative analysis of two surveys carried out among over 2000 people. The analysis allowed researchers to identify that the genres most frequently requested and those with which writers struggled the most, in both academic and professional contexts, were: report (informe), requisition (requerimiento), resolution (resolución), agreement (contrato) and minute (acta). It also revealed that the biggest challenges faced by both sets of people when having to write those genres were: unawareness of the proper structure and lexical choice. These findings confirm that both students and administrative professionals face issues when writing the textual genres specific to their field. Likewise, they suggest that there is some correspondence between university curricula and professional practice in terms of writing administrative genres.

This article analyzes the attenuating function of verbal forms expressing doubt in semi-structured interviews found in the PRESEEA corpus of Santiago de Chile. 36 interviews, collected in 2009, were analized taking into account the participants image, speech acts, and discursive positions. Verb sociolinguistic variation —as determined by sex, age, and education level— was also examined. The main doubt expressions with an attenuating function found include doxastic verbs such as creer (“believe”) and suponer (“suppose”), the modal verbs deber (“must” or “should”) and poder (“could”, “might”), and the verb expressing lack of knowledge no saber (“to not know”). These expressions occur when speakers express their true point of view as a doubt, or when they report a state of affairs. The result is a speaker directed towards the “other”, who does not want to expose their image to their interlocutor, when the speaker expresses opinions about controversial topics or when they report facts that they prefer not to express openly. Sociolinguistic variation is scarce and is mostly related to age.

This article depicts the current state of the art of English-language audiovisual translation (AVT) and sheds light on the recent changes impacting media localisation practices, viewing patterns, and viewer agency. The motivations that have catapulted practices like subtitling and dubbing into English on video-on-demand (VOD) platforms are considered, and special emphasis is placed on the move from English-language content to the production and distribution of originals created in a multitude of languages and showcased on streaming platforms with subs and dubs in English. Some of the latest technological advancements are discussed as they have influenced the viewing experience and audience selection of AVT modes, leading to a significant change in viewing patterns and preferences of anglophone viewers. Challenges posed to studying and training in English AVT are identified and the importance of inverting one’s gaze and perceiving English as the target language of translation, rather than the source language, is stressed in this new paradigm. Concrete suggestions are made for potential avenues of research in this flourishing field, which will hopefully contribute to painting a more detailed picture of English AVT.

Besides big Hollywood productions, like The Godfather trilogy, and video-on-demand productions, like The Sopranos, both filmed in English, new popular Italian productions, based on the linguistic and cultural representation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia, have gained momentum. Nonetheless, the body of academic research on the linguistic traits of the former is larger than research on the latter. This study aims to investigate how and by which strategies the lexicon and the culture-bound terms related to the concept of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia are culturally transferred and subtitled from Italian into English. The TV series Vendetta: guerra nell’antimafia is used as the corpus for both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. Results show that the translation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia for the purpose of audiovisual translation, through subtitling, is a simpler and less convoluted form of translation than written legal translation, aimed at conveying complex concepts in a simpler way.

Given the increase of non-English audiovisual content, translating through pivot templates is increasingly common. Yet, pivot templates have attracted scant scholarly attention. Several factors remain unclear. Among the first factors are the questions of who creates pivot templates, from what languages are they translated, into what languages are they translated, and what audiovisual products and channels are they for? Secondly, what are the challenges involved in the creation of templates? The third factor would be whether there is any training available for pivot template creators, and whether this training is effective. To provide more clarity on these issues, we distributed a questionnaire and elicited replies from 100 pivot templators and 75 subtitler trainers based in Europe. The results indicate that most pivot templators translate into English as L2. Because of this, diverse difficulties arise. Training in pivot template making seems rare, especially compared to training in subtitling in general. The training that is offered comes mainly from the industry and not academia. This is problematic for various reasons: (a) the former does not typically cover issues related to subtitler ethics or the sustainability of the profession, and (b) translator training and professional codes of conduct eye L2 translation with suspicion. Drawing on the respondents’ insights, we argue that much can be gained from teaching non-English-language native speakers how to create English-language templates.

This paper reports an investigation into the representation of “Italianness” in the recent Netflix Italian series Generazione 56k, which was exported to English-speaking countries. This series deals with characters from different generations and displays regional varieties. This qualitative study examined the macro- and micro-strategies used in the creation of English subtitles for the first season. The focus is on key functions of telecinematic discourse, i.e., characterisation, realism, and humour, realised through the use of (a) multilingualism in the broadest sense, including geographical dialects, and (b) multi-generational language (colloquialisms, “unconventional language”, particularly, teenage and youth language, and taboo). Findings reveal a tendency towards neutralisation strategies in the English subtitles. Even considering the constraints inherent in the subtitling mode, these strategies do not successfully represent “Italianness” with its local geographical diversity, and only partially convey the representation of multi-generational language, also affecting humour. The themes engaging millennials, however, are expressed and might be appreciated by an international audience. In the light of our analysis and conclusions, it may be interesting to understand whether younger generations, increasingly accustomed to “multilingualism” especially in Netflix programmes, would also envisage a different subtitling experience.

The current international advertising scenario has led to a new professional profile within advertising translation called transcreator. Transcreation has an explicit call for creativity and semiotic and cultural adaptation. Beer advertising has tried to respond to this call by undergoing significant changes when this product has been internationally marketed in English in global advertising campaigns. For example, Estrella Damm, advertised as “the beer of Barcelona”, has improved its international positioning with its Mediterráneamente campaign, which started in 2009 and has centred on the association of beer with the Mediterranean culture and enjoyment. Since 2019, the campaign has promoted sustainability as “another way of living”. In this article, we examine the English translation strategies used by Estrella Damm’s campaigns between 2009–2021, which are available on the company’s British website and YouTube channel. Specifically, we focus on the following prominent elements: slogans, cultural references, and songs. To do this, we use a descriptive case study methodology, with textual analysis and semi-structured interviews to the creative director and the translators of Estrella Damm commercials. The analysis shows that this campaign uses strategies that are common in advertising translation: internationalisation, envisaged from the start of campaign; dialogue between translators and art directors; some adaptation to the conventions of the target language and culture, and creativity and co-creation. This emphasizes the added value of transcreation in the translation industry.

The Colombian film industry is growing and gaining relevance in the international market, which demands products that comply with the highest quality standards. Consequently, a study was designed to analyze the current English subtitle quality of five Colombian films that participated in different international film festivals from 2012 to 2018 and won at least one award: La sirga by William Vega (2012), La playa D.C. by Juan Andrés Arango (2013), Tierra en la lengua by Rubén Mendoza (2014), La tierra y la sombra by César Augusto Acevedo (2015), and Niña errante by Rubén Mendoza (2018). The subtitles were examined using Pedersen’s (2017) far model to have a general overview of their quality. The results evidenced a weakness in the functional equivalence category by presenting mistranslations in many of the cultural references and idiomatic expressions, potentially affecting the audience’s reception and, therefore, jeopardizing the international success of the films. Additionally, the readability category included many segmentation and spotting errors. In general, the subtitles comply with the subtitling guidelines regarding reading speed and line length but need to improve the transmission of idiomatic expressions and the segmentation of the subtitles.

Accents are often utilised in fictional audiovisual products to determine the creation of character identity. This is due to the set of cultural connotations typically associated with any given accent in any given language community. However, is there really one monolingual target audience anymore? In the age of streaming platforms, and at the rate the localisation industry is creating subtitles and revoiced versions, the target audience for many products has become multilingual. The English ‘dubbing revolution’, pioneered by streaming giant Netflix, perfectly depicts the broadening of target audiences in global distribution. The subject of this article is the popularly termed ‘foreignisation’ strategy, as it features in English dubs. The strategy is explored in relation to the novelty of (English) dubbing for most viewers as well as the ubiquity of foreign varieties of English in everyday life in the Anglosphere and, consequently, in English-language original fiction. Theoretical insights are also offered on the unique acceptance of English dubbing, in general, and of foreign accents as a dubbing strategy, in particular. The case of the Castilian-Spanish dubbing industry is also explored for contrastive purposes, elucidating the characteristics of (im)mature dubbing audiences: their habits, preferences, and (in)flexibility. The conclusions present a set of hypotheses drawn from the article’s discussion that provide plausible answers to the questions posed in the article’s title.

Audiovisual translation has undergone a revolution in the last decade, with an increase in the number of non-English speaking productions. This has increasingly turned English into a pivot language. This article presents a mixed study aiming to profile translators who work with English as a pivot language. It describes the characteristics of assignments in language combinations involving English as a pivot language. In addition, translators’ experiences and opinions on this practice are collected. Data collection was carried out by means of a questionnaire and personal interviews with professionals who have dealt with assignments of this nature. The results show that this practice has increased in the last five years due to the expansion of video on demand. Even so, this type of assignment accounts for less than 10% of the workload of the translators surveyed. Moreover, this practice is used with both common and exotic languages in the Spanish AVT market. Translators recognise that this is not a deontologically ideal practice, but it enables the reception of products that would otherwise be unavailable in Spain.

Streaming video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms have recently set out to produce an ever-increasing number of non-English-language films and tv series distributed worldwide. These, in turn, have become the perfect vehicle for disseminating cultural realities other than those from English-speaking countries. In this article, we endeavour to analyse the presence of stereotypes and cultural references in the English-dubbed version of the Spanish tv series Valeria (Benítez, 2020–present) and the way they travel through dubbing. To this end, we conducted a comparative study in which seven video excerpts from the English-dubbed version and their original Spanish version were shown to 57 native English-speaking participants from a British higher education institution, who shared a similar knowledge of Spanish as a foreign language. Specifically, we explored the participants’ overall perception of humorous passages, their identification of cultural references, their informed opinion on the translation techniques applied (and alternatives given), and their self-assessment of the metacognitive effort required. The findings show two aspects of learners: (a) overall, these learners were eager to maintain stereotypes and cultural references used for humorous purposes in audiovisual comedies, and (b) their understanding of these items often relies on audiovisual support. The findings offer an initial examination of English speakers’ cognitive and evaluative perception of Spanish comedies that have been dubbed in English and can be useful for translator training purposes.

Although dubbing has traditionally been associated with the so-called dubbing countries, the advent of digitalisation and streaming is nowadays encouraging the consumption of dubbed content across territories unaccustomed to watching foreign fiction with dubs, such as the Anglophone market. Despite the effort put into drawing in a wide and satisfied audience in these countries, an unfavourable response from some viewers has called into question the quality of English dubbed versions and the odds of forging a consolidated dubbing industry in such regions. The main aim of this article is to offer insights into how poor quality and the lack of a long professional tradition might compromise engagement and cinematic illusion and into how the lack of exposure to this mode might have a negative impact on the way the dubbed content is received and enjoyed by English users. The article also intends to discuss the many ways in which quality and habituation affect the dubbing experi­ence. This is done by exploring both the potential constraints that impair the final version and the factors that encourage an amenable attittude to this mode amongst the audience, de­spite their inexperience as dubbing consumers. The conclusions stress the need to enhance English dubbing quality at different levels and the importance of habituation to make dubbing work from a cognitive, linguistic, and prosodic standpoint.

Audiovisual translation into English is recently gaining importance as the material produced in other languages is now increasingly crossing borders thanks to the internet. This article explores foul language, deemed one of the most problematic aspects of subtitling. The aim is to elucidate how this is normally subtitled into English. Drawing on a corpus of swearwords from Netflix Spanish comedy series El Vecino (Vigalondo, 2019‒2021), this paper examines the frequency of use of different translation techniques and the reasons behind the omission of certain instances of foul language. Results show that, while omitting swearwords is the second most common scenario, the most frequent one is transferring the offensive load of the original expression, with roughly 70 % of instances making it into the target product. As for factors influencing this decision, it was observed that overall swearwords are omitted not because they are offensive, but primarily because of their low narrative value, the subtitling’s vulnerability, and the interaction between swearwords and non-verbal elements. Time and space constraints of subtitling appear to have little impact. These results suggest that the potential influence of censorship and cultural differences on foul language omissions in English subtitles is presented as a possible research avenue.

Although standard Italian is taught from primary school and is widely prevalent in the media, dialects are still spoken in many households all over the country. This trend is captured by many popular video-on-demand providers such as Netflix and HBO, who are diversifying their offer by promoting their own non-English language productions via both subtitling and dubbing. This article analyses how language variation, particularly in the form of dialect and slang, is adapted for dubbing in the Italian Netflix series Baby (2018‒2020) and Suburra: Blood on Rome (2017–2020). Specifically, it examines the most common translational strategies that have been implemented in the dubbing of both series in English. In particular, dialectal elements are often translated directly or generalised, at times, with the addition of taboo words. Correspondingly, youth jargon is largely translated via direct translations or creative additions. Despite having two different age groups at the centre of the narration, similar translation strategies were used in the two series. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that dialect is used to define social disparity, since characters involved with criminality speak principally dialect whereas wealthy students, affluent characters, politicians, and churchmen draw on standard Italian primarily.

Within the current context of a surge of foreign audiovisual content dubbed into English, the purpose of this article is to analyze how, half a century earlier, a dubbese developed in the translation of Euro-Westerns into English, resulting in a disruption of the established lexis of American Westerns. In order to analyze the root of this phenomenon, a corpus of fifteen American Westerns and their translations for dubbing into Spanish was compiled to understand how the Spanish distinctive lexis of the genre developed between the 1940s and 60s. Then, another parallel corpus of fifteen Euro-Westerns from the 60s and 70s with Spanish scripts and their English translations for dubbing was collected to explore whether the artificially created Spanish dubbese had any linguistic effect by means of its translation into English upon the canonical lexis of American Westerns. Finally, a comparable corpus was derived from the two previous corpora and analyzed. The results show that several distinctive lexical elements used in the corpus of American Westerns were replaced in the Euro-Westerns dubbed into English by terms never used in the original genre due to the influence of foreign scriptwriters. Thus, dubbese can be found in both cultural contexts. At first it was developed in dubbed American Westerns and, eventually, to a lesser degree, in dubbed Euro-Westerns.

The study of relativizers in the Spanish language has not been quite explored from a sociolinguistic point of view. A few research papers have analyzed varieties found in Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Sevilla, and Madrid. Nevertheless, none of them has addressed a Colombian variety in depth. This variationist study aims to fill the gap by reporting the results of a correlational study focused on the use and variation of relativizers in the preseea-Medellín corpus. An anova test, a Games-Howell test, multiple Tukey’s tests, and pairwise comparisons t-tests with Bonferroni correction were run to identify the variables with significant effects (e.g., geographical position, gender, level of education, and social class). Results suggest that, while there is significant diatopic variation in the selection of relativizers, diastratic variables have a minor role in their frequency of use. It was also noted that while the use of the pronoun que tends to spread in all varieties of Spanish, the relative adjectives cuyo and cuanto continue their trend towards disuse. Further studies are necessary to determine if this tendency to simplification is related to psycholinguistic constraints (i.e. mental load) or functional aspects of Spanish. Finally, this study opens the doors to the analysis of relativizers in other varieties of Colombian Spanish from a sociolinguistic perspective.

In a country struggling to emerge from the shadows of a relentless armed conflict, where media manipulation puts a stable reconciliation process at risk, foreign language educators are called on to act. This article presents the results of a study conducted with three foreign language students tudying in one of the sites of a public university in the Department of Antioquia, Colombia, located in a region affected by cultural, structural, direct, and ecological violence. The study resorted to critical peace education and critical media literacy theories as well as to local contributions from a pedagogy of memory to foster critical consciousness about the armed conflict in Colombia. Data collection methods included a survey, recordings of class discussions, samples of students' work, and individual and group interviews. Data showed that the participants reflected critically on the role of different war agents, increased their capacity to question media messages, recognized the relevance of including the victims’ voices, and created counter-texts to contest dominant narratives about the conflict. Findings confirm the urgent need to prepare future foreign language educators to respond to their learners’ harsh social realities and exert their agency to generate transformations. They also highlight the need to do more interdisciplinary work in ELT and to value the contributions of local knowledge that helps us both understand the dynamics of violence in our contexts and envision possibilities for peacebuilding in Colombia.

Abstracts in research articles play a crucial role in settling the impact of academic articles. However, despite the abundance of research on academic discourse, variation in its linguistic features among scholars from different academic cultures seems to have remained untouched. This corpus linguistics study presents a comparative analysis of interactional metadiscourse markers in 96 research article abstracts written in English by both Russian and Spanish scholars in the field of linguistics. The study is based on the assumption that the distribution of interactional metadiscourse devices is different in the abstracts produced by each group of scholars. This is because Spanish academic discourse has been influenced by the growing expansion of Anglophone academic conventions to a larger extent. The theoretical basis of the study is Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy of interactional metadiscourse markers, which offers a pragmatically-grounded method for studying different types of such markers in academic discourse. Findings revealed that Spanish scholars leave more traces of themselves in their writing and take far more explicitly involved positions than Russian scholars. These findings carry pedagogical implications for academic writing course designers and instructors and can enhance non-native English writers’ knowledge of culture-specific and international academic writing conventions in the discipline.

This article presents a literature review to provide inputs to build a theoretical framework and select a methodology to study the sociolinguistic reality of the Embera Chamí community displaced to the urban context of Bogotá, Colombia. In order to carry it out, a selection and synthesis of 68 printed and electronic documents published since 2000 in databases, digital libraries and websites of various organizations were used. The thematic and content analysis, based on categorization and coding, dealt with three thematic axes: the first axis offers a historical overview of the Embera Chamí community, both nationally and locally, the places of origin and the various causes and effects of the phenomenon of displacement. The second axis succinctly describes the Embera Chamí language phonetically, phonologically and grammatically. The last axis presents concepts such as superdiversity, communities of practice and contact networks of diverse nature, as well as some initiatives for the promotion of the Embera Chamí language and culture. The review suggests the need to establish a dialogue between the concepts arising from sociolinguistic theory, the particular context and the worldview of community members, through empirical ethnographic work that incorporates various data collection mechanisms.

Nowadays, English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers needed to adapt their practices to continue teaching the foreign language with the use of different emerging technologies and online platforms. This required them to develop a greater number of digital skills to promote students’ language production and achievement. Drawing on evidence which suggests that task repetition is beneficial for developing oral production in speaking and writing tasks, this exploratory study investigates the fluency and accuracy demonstrated by seven Mexican EFL students from a state university in a monologue narrative task performed on WhatsApp following a task repetition design. Fluency and accuracy metrics show that these skills appear to fluctuate in the students during the performance of the task. Interestingly, they also suggest that only fluency increased as the weeks went by, while accuracy development was limited. These results raise questions about the dynamic nature of fluency and how it may interact with accuracy, other language dimensions, student-related factors, and the online environment.

This research was set to uncover Iranian English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers’ attitudes toward the use of learning management systems (LMS) in English classes. Employing a mixed methods research design, the researchers recruited 168 Iranian EFL teachers from several schools and language institutions as research participants and sent them a valid self-report questionnaire to gather quantitative data. Simultaneously, they conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 teachers to collect qualitative data. Findings revealed that Iranian EFL teachers adopted both positive and negative perceptions of LMS use. The positive perceptions included ease of access, knowledge sharing, suitability for crowded classes, variety of learning tasks, and more advanced assignments and feedback. In turn, negative views comprised inadequacy of teacher training programs, inappropriacy for productive skills, complexity of functions, and students’ unfamiliarity with the systems as well as lack of interest. These results may offer significant insights into EFL practitioners’ perceptions of a variety of measures that can be taken by teacher development programs to encourage the use of LMS in EFL contexts.

Traditionally, social research in Mexico has not adjusted so much to a multilingual phenomenal reality as to a monolingualistic social imaginary representation. This means that when researchers analyze their reality, they do so under personal biases; thus, ignoring and hiding the daily multilingual reality. To find out how these linguistic prejudices and biases affect the methods applied, the authors of the present case study analyzed 77 postgraduate theses carried out in 2002-2019 at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico. These theses applied interview techniques to speakers of national indigenous languages. The results show their study designs tend to linguistically homogenize populations based on a monolingual nationalist imagined community. A prevalence of more than 90 % in the application of linguistically minoritizing interviews evidences the pervasiveness of monolingual attitudes in the academy that limit methodological results and discriminate against studied populations. This means that the detection of linguistically minoritizing interviews can serve as another indicator to assess the university as an entity that exercises linguistic pressure on the communities being studied.

In the South American context, migrant population makes up for a large portion of the population who, in most cases, stop using their heritage language. This work aims to present the results of a study that inquired about the status of the Croatian language as a heritage language in South America, and analized the tensions between linguistic displacement and maintenance. The analysis is focused on Argentina, where an estimated 250 000 to 500 000 people are from Croatian descent. The study is based upon a corpus of Croatian speech gathered from second- and third-generation migrants and from official and non-official records, gathered by the authors. Findings suggest that there are signs of linguistic attrition at the phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical levels. They also suggest that identity and language aware­ness strengthening play a significant role in the maintenance of the ancestral language in this migrating context. The study contributes to the field of minority and endangered languages, and helps understand the dynamic pro­cesses influencing the vitality of heritage languages.

The unprecedented situation of COVID-19 compelled many universities and colleges worldwide to reconsider both the management and delivery of classes, forcing faculty to use innovative online and mobile means. The transition also caused faculty to reevaluate their professional development (PD). This qualitative exploratory study focused on the pd experienced by a group of foreign language university instructors in Colombia during this crisis. Specifically it identified the challenges encountered and how these were tackled. Data were collected through an open-ended survey and analyzed using content analysis. Results show ten main challenges, which were then categorized into three themes: (a) adaptation to emergency remote teaching, (b) promotion of student engagement, and (c) handling of emotions. Conclusions reveal that professors embraced the crisis with a positive attitude, engaging in different PD opportunities, displaying agency, responsibility, and flexibility. Therefore, the challenges and their reaction to them fostered their PD and learning. These findings suggest that institutions should allow instructors to give input into the types of PD programs that they need for specific situations.

A partir de un enfoque interdisciplinario, este artículo analiza la estética cinematográfica persistente en La casa grande, de Cepeda Samudio, mediante un abordaje inédito de la obra literaria en términos técnicos del cine, como lo son los planos, la espacialidad, los efectos sonoros, la escritura tipo guion y las imágenes. Se amplía, de este modo, la tendencia netamente indicativa con que previamente se abordó esta materia en la novela. El análisis se realiza a partir de antecedentes biográficos del autor, sus influjos artísticos, y su particular manera de tomar el suceso histórico y llevarlo a la literatura. El propósito es producir una interpretación de La casa grande como si fuese una realización fílmica a partir de ejemplos concretos. Se concluye que la presencia de estas características fílmicas es generalizada y original en su naturaleza, con lo que se establecen puntos de partida para posteriores discusiones orientadas a la presencia de momentos sensitivos e imágenes fetiche en la obra.

Cryptocurrencies have been the latest technological revolution in the world of finances. Although this revolution has not been completed yet, and as a payment method is still limited, their popularity has vastly increased since 2020 due to speculation about their value. As in any other field, any revolution in economics, technology, education, or society implies another parallel language revolution. This is how the introduction of cryptocurrencies has led to the emergence of some new forms of language. This quantitative case study aims to analyze the characteristics of that crypto language and identify some of the most usual words, acronyms, metaphors, and other popular expressions within this field. To achieve this purpose, a glossary published by the company Bit2Me was used along with the Google search bar, which provided the number of appearances on the net. Results showed that some neologisms had been created, acronyms prevailed over some words and expressions, and the use of animal metaphors was a usual practice. These results contribute to the field of electronic finances by showing that the community of cryptocurrency users have created their own linguistic rules to communicate among them with the use of specific words, as detailed in this paper.

La empresa estadounidense Netflix se ha convertido en una de las plataformas de transmisión en directo de contenido multimedia más poderosas del mundo. Actualmente, las redes sociales, en especial Twitter e Instagram, ofrecen a empresas y marcas, como esta, la posibilidad de comunicarse de manera directa con su audiencia. Por esta razón, Netflix acostumbra usar dichas redes como plataforma publicitaria. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las estrategias de traducción y las transcreaciones empleadas por Netflix en sus cuentas de Twitter e instagram en español, y comparar las dos versiones para valorar posibles diferencias en las estrategias usadas. Para ello, hemos partido de un corpus de 26 mensajes publicados en las dos redes sociales durante el primer semestre de 2018 y hemos realizado un estudio de tipo descriptivo. Los resultados sugieren que las estrategias de traducción usadas en España son distintas de las de los perfiles latinos, que recurren más habitualmente a la transcreación. Además, observamos que mientras que Twitter se utiliza preferentemente para presentar nuevos productos, Instagram se emplea como medio para afianzarlos en la audiencia.

In the last few years, Colombian ELT scholars have become aware of the importance of discourse for the dissemination of ideologies and agendas. As a result, the number of studies on this area has shown an unprecedented growth. Nevertheless, few investigations have explored and analyzed both sides simultaneously so as to display not only the types of hegemonic discourses that have permeated the field but also those which have recently emerged in response to such a situation. Considering these elements, this paper reports on a qualitative case study carried out with the purpose of analyzing the latest types of hegemonic discourses and discourses of resistance that have taken place in elt in Colombia. After analyzing the data gathered, which consisted of empirical and conceptual articles, as well as linguistic policies emitted by the Colombian Ministry of Education (men), the results showed that discourses revolving around bilingualism (understood as the English-Spanish relationship), identity, and native speakerism have been a recurrent aspect in the Colombian elt field. Yet, findings also suggest that, especially in the last decade, elt scholars have been resisting these discourses by promoting alternative ones that acknowledge initiatives in different areas of knowledge. In light of these aspects, it is recommended to keep resisting and promoting an agenda of decolonization so that alternative discourses, as is the case of those that acknowledge the incorporation of epistemologies that have been historically overlooked, continue gaining traction within the field.

As English spreads globally, it continues to displace local languages and cultures at all levels of education. Concerned with this issue, in this article we report our experiences as English instructors attempting to decolonize English lessons to embrace the diverse cultures, languages, and realities of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian students enrolled in English courses at a public university in Medellín, Colombia. To attain this, we framed lessons from a decolonial, critical intercultural (ci) perspective and strived to interrogate language ideologies and cultural power relations by inviting students’ languages and cultures to the classroom. The experience suggests that sustaining local languages and cultures through English entails the production of teaching materials that contest the erasure, homogenization, and misrepresentations of Black and Indigenous peoples. It also implies positioning students as experts on their cultures and as text producers, all of which provides a broader understanding of intersectionality in Indigenous and Black communities.

Colombian English Language Teaching (ELT) is experiencing a paradigmatic change guided by the decolonial turn. This turn has enriched the debate about the implementation of a bilingual policy in Colombia, its impact on languages other than English, the purposes of learning English in the country, and English teacher practices and identities. This article shares the results of a critical ethnography that collected data from students and teacher educators from elt preparation programs and institutional and legal documents. Results indicate that, in Colombian elt, there are six discursive tensions representing coloniality. These are (a) English teachers as instructors or as educators; (b) native or non-native English speakers; (c) poor image of foreign language teachers as opposed to an idealized language teacher; (d) instrumental or cognitive and intercultural purposes for learning English; (e) emphasis on disciplinary knowledge or on interdisciplinary knowledge; and (f ) division or integration between theory and practice. To counter these tensions, a set of criteria are proposed. These criteria are: (a) elt preparation graduates are professionals in language pedagogy; (b) they are multilingual educated teachers; (c) they are well-rounded professional educators; (d) English is a means of recognizing diversity; (e) elt preparation programs embrace interdisciplinarity as a decolonizing option; and (f ) ELT preparation programs promote praxis. To conclude, the criteria proposed aim to shift initial language teacher education from an instrumental vision to a reflexive one, considering what is being learned, how, with whom, in what contexts, and the reasons that justify it.

In addressing the 21st century neocolonial research condition, in this article the au- thors firstly discuss how academia in general, and elt in particular, may configure as oppressive colonizing sites. Secondly, they introduce their own experience as pre- service and in-service educators who took part in pedagogy of possibilities (pop) at a university in Tunja, Colombia. Indigenous principles like interconnectedness and relationality and Chicanx/Latinx concepts, such as bodymindspirit, path of cono- cimiento, and spiritual activism were foundational to these educators’ pop. To them, pedagogy was a political act to resist the disembodied/disengaged/dispassionate nature of teaching/researching/being in academia and beyond. This four-year crit- ical-community autoethnography, uses testimonies, journals, and artistic creations as knowledge-gathering methods to analyze how decolonizing teaching-research practices informed the re-signification of these educators’ personal and professional identities. Theoretical coding revealed that pop permitted participants to engage in decolonial practices of self-recognition, re-construction, empowerment, growth, and healing. The analysis also revealed that decolonizing the self leads to the adoption of a positionality where values such as care and respect for one’s self and communities are paramount to move forward social-justice-critical-decolonial agendas. The results suggest the need to re-signify elt pedagogical and educational practices beyond neo- liberal agendas which propose rankings, individualism, and competition.

The use of Colombian-authored EFL textbooks as subalternation instruments, the instrumentalization of grammar and foreign methodologies, and the imperialism of a profit-driven publishing industry perpetuates colonial links. This article reports a critical content analysis of six Colombian-authored EFL textbooks from local and foreign publishers. It was framed within a sociocritical paradigm, which included interviews with four authors, six teachers, and two editors. Findings reveal three triads of decolonial criteria: (a) The triad of ontological criteria unsettles the reproduction of foreign beliefs, behaviours, values, and ideologies; (b) the triad of epistemological criteria subverts North and West dominant knowledge and culture, and (c) the triad of power criteria withstands globalised and neoliberal discourses imposed through teaching methods, curricula, materials, testing, training, and standardised English varieties. The findings also indicate that there are still colonial traces in the representation of gender, races, sexual orientations, capacities, and social classes. Thus, developing efl materials from a decolonial perspective contests the commercial, standardised, and colonised textbooks to build contextualised and decolonised efl materials otherwise that are sensitive to cultural diversity. This academic endeavour exhorts teachers to assume a critical stance towards EFL materials content, learning activities and strategies, underpinning language pedagogies, iconography, language policy, and assessment practices, and to exert their agency to contest hegemony and recreate situated EFL pedagogical practices.

O ensino-aprendizagem de línguas pode contribuir tanto para a manutenção de hierarquizações e apagamentos ideológicos quanto para a promoção de espaços acolhedores e problematizadores. Mesmo assim, a produção de materiais didáticos que contribuam para que as subjetividades e os saberes indígenas penetrem os muros das instituições educacionais pode ser considerado um processo capaz de contribuir para a união de forças e movimentos sociais articulados, dirigidos à mudar essa realidade. Partindo desse pressuposto, neste artigo, visamos analisar como os povos originários e as literaturas indígenas foram abordados num volume da coleção pedagógica intitulada Rotas de Educação Crítica para Docentes do Inglês. Ainda mais, avaliamos o potencial de suleamento da educaçâo em línguas e aprofondamos no análisis das noções de língua(gem), identidades e literaturas que informam o material. Ainda, avaliamos a profundidade das discussões propostas e a possível (re)produção de repertórios pejorativos e narrativas únicas sobre os povos originários. Entendemos que o material tem uma proposta inovadora, com possibilidade de contribuir para a formação docente engajada socialmente e atenta a diferentes identidades, saberes, culturas e epistemologias. Assim, apontamos que, embora o material não tenha sido concebido na base de propostas decoloniais, ele constitui-se como uma resposta do Sul dedicada à formação docente empenhada em promover um olhar crítico e engajado nas questões sociais. As implicações de propostas como essa são a ampliação de movimentos de identificação, denúncia e interrupção de hierarquizações, invisibilidades e inviabilidades da colonialidade que nos constitui, contribuindo assim para a construção de realidades outras.

Este artículo presenta los hallazgos de la implementación de un curso de desarrollo profesional docente, llevado a cabo con 17 profesores de inglés, francés y otras lenguas extranjeras de una universidad pública en Colombia. Su objetivo fue explorar la interculturalidad crítica mediante la promoción de la reflexión en torno a las prácticas de los profesores y la construcción de propuestas de enseñanza más equitativas en sus clases. Esta iniciativa, enmarcada en un estudio cualitativo de investigación-acción, se orientó por las ideas del pensamiento decolonial y la interculturalidad crítica. Los métodos de recolección de datos incluyeron entrevistas, grabaciones de las sesiones del curso, planeaciones de clases de lenguas extranjeras y reflexiones de los participantes. Los hallazgos revelan que los docentes desarrollaron comprensiones de la interculturalidad como un proceso de construcción de equidad, íntimamente ligado a la negociación de identidades y atravesado por relaciones de poder. Estos resultados sugieren que los espacios de desarrollo profesional docente pueden contribuir a la construcción de un proyec­to intercultural propio en el campo de las lenguas extranjeras, que sea respetuoso y consecuente con las realidades, problemáticas y diversidades de los pueblos y territorios colombianos y latinoamericanos, que fortalezca la producción de conocimiento local situado, y que dialogue con conocimientos de otras latitudes.

Recent epistemological and ontological revisions demonstrate a change within the elf geopolitics of knowledge as voices from the global South begin to claim themselves as knowledge producers within a field strongly marked by the European hegemony. This article aims at analyzing the concept and field of inquiry of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) from a decolonial perspective. Founded on the work of one the authors and departing from the decolonial exercise of identification-interrogation-interruption, the article identifies the main ELF tenets, brings up different voices in the field, and interrogates who these voices belong to, and where they come from. Findings show a complex weave of meanings still marked by coloniality traces in which hegemonic European views place themselves as hybris del punto cero despite the multiplicity of elf views and practices all over the globe. The authors advocate for attentive and critical reading of elf, particularly, with regards to where knowledge is generated and who generates such knowledge if one wishes to delink from self-assured global north elf epistemologies. They also propose a decolonial praxis in the reading of elf as a pre-condition towards the interruption of coloniality.

Em tempos de globalização neoliberal, a língua inglesa tem assumido espaço hegemônico como língua da comunicação, da ciência, dos negócios, da mídia e da educação. Esse espaço, naturalizado em decorrência de questões de poder, política e colonialidade, tende a apagar questões como quem pode falar inglês, que variedade é validada e a quem ele pertence, por exemplo. Diante dessa problemática, resgatamos nossas pesquisas de doutoramento, ambas estudos qualitativos realizados no espaço da universidade sobre a formação inicial de professoras e da escola pública sobre a formação continuada de professoras, com o intento de investigar como a concepção de língua e, portanto, de língua inglesa, moldou e ressignificou as práticas das participantes das pesquisas nos contextos mencionados. Para tanto, o estudo baseou-se em perspectivas críticas e decoloniais, sobretudo nas reflexões produzidas pelo grupo Latino-americano Modernidade/Colonialidade. As reflexões feitas apontaram para tensões existentes entre as concepções de língua enquanto código ou enquanto prática social nos imaginários e práticas das participantes em ambos os contextos de formação docente. Por fim, o espaço ambivalente e situado da sala de aula de inglês é considerado produtivo para a desconstrução e expansão de conhecimentos, bem como para a reconfiguração da função da educação e dos papéis assumidos por professoras e estudantes em sua formação.

We are two teachers engaged with English language teaching (ELT) from a critical perspective. As many other instructors who share this same line of thought, we have felt discomfort throughout our careers when evaluating students. Students, in turn, have also experienced the triggering of emotions, such as insecurity and imposterism when facing a test. This happens because there is still a predominance of structuralist, modern, and positivist assumptions in teaching, and more evidently, in assessment. With this background, we turned our attention to assessment in a more critical way, trying to develop a project that challenged the traditional, hegemonic, and normative paradigms in elt and proposed an alternative otherwise. This is how, at a language center from a Federal University in Brazil, we decided to explore a different way of doing assessment by asking students to collaboratively create booklets during one semester. In this article, we present and reflect on the approach we took. We conclude by arguing that assessment can be seen as a movement of avaliar se avaliando, a practice characterized by the reflexivity of teachers and students throughout the process.