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The main purpose of this study is to examine a popular Thai genre of the novel, romance fiction, with a focus on the modes of subjectivity and discourses of femininity and masculinity to be found in Thai romance novels between the 1940s and 1990s. The thesis also seeks to locate the various socio-cultural contexts of Thai society, which influence the constitution of Thai gender relations and the transformation of gender norms. Additionally, it attempts to address the issue of the usefulness of Western theories of gender and romance, which are widely regarded in Thailand as tools of Westernization and new forms of colonialism. This study suggests that Thai gender relations are complicated, since there are several disparate aspects that influence the constitution of male and female subjectivity. Western influence is one of these aspects that help define femininity and masculinity, while domestic beliefs also play a salient role as palimpsests that are not easily erased. Thus, the representation of various modes of gendered subjectivity in romance fiction concurrently indicates both changes in and the reproduction of discourses that define an „essence‟ of gender identity that accords with traditional Thai cultural beliefs including the deep-rooted idea that the primary purpose of writing is didactic.

Many English teachers posed the problem that their Arab students were able to construct grammatically correct sentences, but were frequently unable to form them into paragraphs or cohesive texts.\ud \ud In my attest to investigate this problem, I started from the assumption that differing patterns of cohesion in English and Arabic probably account for many difficulties Arab students have in writing English. Sane attempts to look at this, based on a contrastive approach, have already been carried out. For my part, I felt the time had came to look at the systems of Arabic in their own terms, which has not yet been done. For this I followed two avenues of study: Functional Sentence Perspective as developed in the Prague School and Halliday and Hasan's work on textual cohesion. For my purpose I selected four lengthy Arabic texts belonging to different text-types which I first analysed from the Functional Sentence Perspective point of view. For this, I followed Dane's (1974) study of thematic progressions, in order to find out what theme-rheme patterns the different Arabic text-types use. \ud \ud In the next step, I investigated the cohesive ties used in written Arabic Halliday and Hasan's model of textual cohesion (1976). I also compared my texts in order to discover if there is a difference in textual cohesion between text-types in Arabic.\ud \ud My analysis of textual cohesion and text development\ud suggests that: \ud \ud 1. Arabic descriptive texts tend to reiterate the same there in successive sentences.\ud 2. Arabic instructive texts favour the use of the linear\ud thematization of rhemes.\ud 3. Arabic makes inter-clausal relationships explicit.\ud 4. Repetition and parallelism are favoured cohesive devices in all text-types.\ud \ud The thesis consists of an introduction followed by a chapter\ud reviewing various approaches to discourse analysis, a chapter on the text-typological approach which has governed my selection of texts; followed by an account of my methodological approach and my analysis.

The study discusses the translation of intertextual expressions in political articles, aiming at understanding the role of intertextuality within the cultural, ideological and individual circles. Critical discourse analysis shows clearly how indispensible intertextuality is to political discourse in particular as a major ideological tool, especially in the information age when the media employ numerous forms of intertextuality to reinforce their message in terms of legitimisation or delegitimisation. Political newspaper comments tend to belong to the argumentative or vocative (appellative) type of texts, which are intended to achieve a maximum impact on the receiver. In an attempt to relay intertextual expressions across languages, a culture-specific problem is mainly found since different aspects of intertextuality are likely to arise in social, historical, religious and literary terrns which form the unique background of each culture. It is suggested that a three-stage process underpins the successful translation of intertextual expressions. First, an intertextual expression needs to be identified; second, its 'host of associations' have to be fully comprehended; thirdly, the appropriate type of equivalence is to be chosen to 'reflect the same ideological force' of the original expression. This is often achieved by means of functional equivalencc, which provides corresponding target language culture expressions that are expected to 'Invoke the same effect' of those of the source language culture.

The thesis proposes to address how the tradition of translating Chinese poetry\ud in the English speaking world developed in the early twentieth century and has\ud continued. Problems relating to this issue, such as the great change in poetics and\ud intellectual atmosphere since 1915 when Cathay appeared, its impact on the\ud translation of Chinese poetry, and the universe of discourse of the two cultures\ud involved, those of the Chinese and the English speaking world, as well as the\ud constraints of the target system on the translations, will also be discussed.\ud The introduction provides an overview of the poetics that valued traditional\ud metres at the turn of the century, and applies polysystem theory to explain the lack of\ud enthusiasm for translations of classical Chinese poetry before 1915. Chapter 2\ud discusses the constraints of language, the poetics and universe of discourse in the\ud target system, suggesting that these constraints handicapped the widespread transfer of\ud classical Chinese poetry before 1915.\ud Chapter 3 examines xing, the poetic device in Chinese poetry that emphasizes\ud the poet's spontaneous response to nature and the merging of scene and feeling. The\ud very nature of xing defies any attempt to make it explicit. The chapter is divided into\ud two parts, discussing xing in the encoding and decoding process respectively. Readerresponse\ud criticism and phenomenology are also incorporated in the discussions. The\ud chapter is followed by an analysis of various attempts to translate poems that are\ud presented with zing in Chapter 4, which shows that there is a tendency on the part of\ud some translators to add logical links between the scene and the feelings expressed.\ud Chapter 5 looks at the translation strategies of Arthur Waley, investigating\ud the traditions of translating classical Chinese poetry that he has helped to build up.\ud The kind of smooth grammatical lines he uses and the Chineseness he conveys have\ud had great influence on subsequent translators. Chapter 6 studies Ezra Pound, with\ud special focus on his innovative work Cathay, and his juxtaposition techniques.\ud Chapter 7 studies Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Du Fu, while Chapter 8\ud examines Gary Snyder's translations of Cold Mountain. The vehicle of translating\ud Chinese poetry in general-- language and poetics-- was close to that of modern\ud poetry in the target culture.\ud Chapter 9, the conclusion, asserts that various strategies are adopted for\ud various purposes. It tries to place the position of the translators discussed in a\ud polysystem context. In the target system, poems are appreciated more for their charm\ud than their being supposedly faithful to an original. The image of China created\ud through translators remains distant. To the reader in the West, China is always far out\ud "there," not here.

This thesis was motivated by Robert Chard's puzzlement over the translational\ud phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West. It proposes to address how the\ud translational migration of martial arts fiction took place, first to other Asian countries in the\ud 1920's, but to the West only after a lapse of a few decades beginning in the early 1990's.\ud Adopting a descriptive approach as described by Gideon Toury, the thesis is intended to\ud add further to the limited inventory of case studies in urgent demand to test the polysystem\ud theory propounded by Even-Zohar.\ud The thesis is made up of two parts. Part I is a macro-level study of martial arts fiction,\ud intended to contribute to testing the limits of the polysystem theory. After examining\ud Chinese fiction as a low form in the Chinese literary polysystem and its weak function as\ud translated literature in the Western literary polysystem, the study explores the translational\ud phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West as well as the concurrent phenomenon as to\ud why so little of martial arts fiction has been translated into Western languages, compared to\ud the copious amount into other Asian languages, to the extent of stimulating a new literary\ud genre or (re)writing martial arts fiction in indigenous languages in Indonesia, Vietnam and\ud Korea, sinicized countries or countries boasting large overseas Chinese communities.\ud Issues and problems related to these translational activities and cultural phenomena are\ud presented as tools to test the limits of the polysystem theory.\ud Part II is a micro-level study focussing on the specifics of rendering Fox Volant of the\ud Snowy Mountain by Jin Yong into English. I will argue, in the main, that many difficulties,\ud inherent in both the translating and reading processes, can be constructed within the\ud theoretical framework of Andre Lefevere's concept of "constraint", particularly that of the\ud universe of discourse. Lefevere's connotation of the universe of discourse will be expanded\ud to embrace different cultural presuppositions and literary assumptions underlying two\ud divergent world cultures, hence different reader expectations in the reading process.\ud It is hoped that the findings and results of this descriptive case history of martial arts fiction\ud as a literary genre in translational migrations will contribute to the accumulation of\ud knowledge.

In this paper, we report a systematic investigation of band-edge photoluminescence for Cd1-x Mn x Te crystals grown by the vertical Bridgman method. The near-band-edge emissions of neutral acceptor-bound excitons (labeled as L1) were systematically investigated as a function of temperature and of alloy composition. The parameters that describe the temperature variation of the energy were evaluated by the semiempirical Varshni relation. From the temperature dependence of the full width at half maximum of the L1 emission line, the broadening factors Γ(T) were determined from the fit to the data. The activation energies of thermal quenching were obtained for the L1 peak from the temperature dependence of the bound exciton peaks and were found to decrease with increasing Mn concentration.

In this work, we have obtained colloidal solutions of Si nanocrystals (Si-ncs), starting from free-standing porous silicon (PSi) layers. PSi layers were synthesized using a two-electrode Teflon electrochemical cell; the etching solution contained hydrogen peroxide 30%, hydrofluoric acid 40% (HF), and methanol. The anodizing current density was varied to 250 mA cm-2, 1 A cm-2, and 1.2 A cm-2. Thus obtained, PSi was mechanically pulverized in a mortar agate; then, the PSi powders were poured into different solutions to get the final Si-ncs colloidal solutions. The different optical, morphological, and structural characteristics of the colloidal solutions with Si-ncs were measured and studied. These Si-ncs colloidal solutions, measured by photoluminescence (PL), revealed efficient blue-green or violet emission intensities. The results of X-ray diffraction (XRD) indicate that the colloidal solutions are mainly composed of silicon nanocrystallites. The result of UV–vis transmittance indicates that the optical bandgap energies of the colloidal solutions varied from 2.3 to 3.5 eV for colloids prepared in methanol, ethanol, and acetone. The transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images showed the size of the nanocrystals in the colloidal solutions. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) spectra showed different types of chemical bonds such as Si-O-Si, Si-CH2, and SiH x , as well as some kind of defects. 61.46Df.-a; 61.43.Gt; 61.05.cp; 78.55.-m; 81.15.Gh