Search

Parasitic platyhelminths are a major burden on humanity through their direct impacts on human health and the huge economic losses they cause, predominantly by undermining agricultural productivity and associated anti-parasite treatments. Previous studies on helminth parasites have highlighted the potential of the neuropeptide signalling system as a source of novel parasite control targets. The use of model organisms is preferable when the target organism is prohibitively difficult or unethical to study directly. The free living microturbellarian Macrostomum lignano is an ideal candidate for the study of parasitic flatworms due to its ease of culture, small size, availability of genomic and transcriptomic datasets and its basal phylogenetic position within the phylum Platyhelminthes. Firstly, this project mapped the distribution of four novel neuropeptides identified from the M. Iignano genome and uses RNA interference (RNAi) on one of those associated neuropeptide genes in an attempt to knockdown the associated transcript and delineate function. Subsequently, the expression of these neuropeptides was examined in selected parasitic flatworms. Despite being successful in the treatment of various parasitic flatworms of animals and humans, the mechanism of action of the anthelmintic praziquantel (PZQ) remains open to debate, hampering efforts to identify mechanisms of resistance and the design of novel drugs which could emulate its effects in parasitic flatworms. The mechanism of action of PZQ was investigated in M. lignano by first determining if the worm was PZQ sensitive. Next the genome was screened for the presence of voltage operated calcium channel (VOCC) β subunit genes (one of the proposed targets of PZQ) which was subsequently silenced using RNA interference to determine if it had a role in PZQ sensitivity in M. lignano. A role for these VOCCs in PZQ action in M. lignano was confirmed using RNAi.

This thesis investigates the re-presentations of conflict in new Turkish cinema vis-à-vis the official discourse in the 1990s and 2000s. It aims to identify to what extent the selected films present alternative perspectives on the conflict in relation to the ones that are promoted in the official discourse. The thesis adopts a critical discourse-analytical approach to the study of the interplay between the films and the official discourse as an intertextual one in which the former revisit and rework the latter. The thesis analyses this interplay on two levels. First, it situates the films within the history of the conflict to establish the effect of the state rhetoric and practices on their production, distribution and reception. Second, the thesis examines each film's interplay with the official discourse through the lens of multilingualism, non-translation and recontextualisation. It draws on the mainstream press as the medium for the identification of the official discourse on the conflict to be taken as a reference point on this second level of analysis. Demonstrating the historical overlap between the official and media discourses on the conflict, the thesis specifically focuses on the broadsheet newspaper, Milliyet, which effectively acted as the mouthpiece of the state. The inquiries into the functions of depicting multilingualism and translation also highlight the linguistic dimension of the conflict and discuss the official language ideology and language policy in Turkey as two interrelated components of the official discourse on the conflict. Finally, the thesis examines the recontextualisation of national symbols, official images, texts, audio and video material, songs and fairy tales in the films in identifying their intertextual references and interplay with the official discourse. The thesis thus introduces new readings of the selected films and contributes to the literature on the depictions of multilingualism and non-translation in Turkish cinema.

Subtitling the scenes containing humorous utterances in cinematic-televisual productions encounters a myriad of challenges, because the subtitler has to face the technical constraints that characterise the professional subtitling environment and the cultural barriers when reproducing humorous utterances for viewers inhabiting another culture. Past studies tend to explore more limited humour-related areas, which means that a more comprehensive picture of this specialised field is missing. The current research investigates the subtitling of humour, drawing on the framework of relevance theory and the British sitcom The Office, translated from English dialogue into Traditional Chinese subtitles. This research enquires into whether or not relevance theory can explain the subtitling strategies activated to deal with various humorous utterances in the sitcom, and, if so, to what extent. The English-Chinese Corpus of The Office (ECCO), which contains sample texts, media files and annotations, has been constructed to perform an empirical study. To enrich the corpus with valuable annotations, a typology of humour has been developed based on the concept of frame, and a taxonomy of subtitling strategies has also been proposed. The quantitative analysis demonstrates that the principle of relevance is the main benchmark for the choice of a subtitling micro-strategy within any given macro-strategy. With the chi-square test, it further proves the existence of a statistically significant association between humour types/frames and subtitling strategies at the global level. The qualitative analysis shows that the principle of relevance can operate in a subtle way, in which the subtitler invests more cognitive efforts to enhance the acceptability of subtitles. It also develops three levels of mutual dependency between the two variables, from strong, weak to null, to classify different examples. Overall, this study improves our understanding of humour translation and can facilitate a change in the curricula of translator training.

This thesis undertakes a comparison of the discursive strategies of New Labour and the German SPD at the turn of the twenty-first century, when both parties engaged in a discourse of the Third Way in order to win over 'the middle ground of the electorate'. Approaching the two discourses with an interdisciplinary set of analytical tools from linguistic discourse analysis (keyword analysis, metaphor analysis, argumentation analysis, genre analysis) and political science (political culture, comparative politics, morphology of ideologies), I demonstrate the similarities and differences between these discourses at a structural level. Germany and the UK differ widely in their political cultures and institutions as well as in their traditions of political discourse, and I analyse how far these differences manifest themselves in the linguistic strategies employed by the German SPD and the British Labour Party in order to change their ideological identity in the 1990s and early 2000s. In order to describe and compare central features of the discourse of the Third Way in Germany and the UK, the analysis begins at the crossing point of the two discourses: a policy paper that became known as the Schröder-Blair paper. The analysis is then enriched by evaluating three key publications by leading proponents of a Third Way (Giddens (1998) The Third Way, Mandelson and Liddle (1996) The Blair Revolution, Hombach (1998) Aufbruch). The second step focuses on two central party-political text types, 'party conference speeches' and 'election manifestos', to demonstrate how they differ in German and English, and which central features of the Third-Way discourse Labour and the SPD employ in these texts to convince the party members and the electorate of their new political orientation. The analysis of the election manifestos also adds a diachronic element, as it contains a corpus-assisted analysis of the election manifestos of Labour and the SPD between 1987 and 2002.