Volume 14 (2017): Issue 1 (November 2017)

The essay analyses Graham Swift’s Ever After and shows that the concepts of time and identity are fictional constructs which stand for a palimpsestic world presented as an eternal stage of past and present stories. Time and identity are revealed to us through symbols which stand for a palimpsestic world. They are reinvented and rewritten according to the narrator’s vision.

Robert Browning’s “Up at a Villa-Down in the City” is a dramatic monologue, a fact unnoted by criticism. Browning employs irony throughout that undercuts the stated views of the speaker, who is not a person of quality, as the subtitle has announced. The speaker reveals himself to be a man of little experience in art and literature, of meager taste, poor judgement, and in general dull and inflexible. Browning cleverly sets up the clues whereby the reader can distinguish between what the speaker intends and what the reader understands. The speaker’s repudiation of the countryside actually makes clear the virtues of country life, and his praise of city life makes it clear what is undesirable in it. Browning accomplishes this manipulation through imagery, ambiguity in language, and by reference to outside facts.

The present paper dwells on the complex representation of the Indian slums in Katherine Boo’s 2012 novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Leaving behind the conventional oversentimentalised and over-optimistic literary and cinematographic depictions, the writer places her text on the boundary between fiction and journalism, discussing poverty, inequality, hope and despair in one of the most surprising cities of the globalised world, from a new perspective.

During the late twentieth century, crisis of masculinity appears in all societal settings; at work, at school, on the street and in the family. The crisis of fatherhood, anxiety, power, and abuse create the crisis of masculinity. As a concrete example of the masculinity crisis Jez Butterworth’s most discussed stage play Mojo was first performed at London’s Royal Court in 1995. This paper takes Mojo under observation as a frontier play depicting a male identity that portrays rock and roll culture, gangland violence, and male Soho gangsters of the 1950s. With these concepts in mind, this paper analyses the contemporary anxieties related to masculinity through witty, absurd dialogues and homoerotic relationships of this striking play.

My paper will explore the genre of war narrative from a cultural perspective, namely the impact of the Great War on Arabs in the novel Al-Raghif (The Loaf’) in 1939 by the Lebanese novelist Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, as it is the first Arabic novel which is totally concerned with WWI and its longlasting consequences: hunger, despair and the elusive promise of freedom to Arabs.

This paper is premised upon the American writer, Paul Bowles, and his journey into Morocco as a liminal topography. In his Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue the traveller-writer crosses borders, moving from the metropolis to the colony as a far-flung territory, a process which is faced with a sense of unrepresentability of the Other and its culture, leading to a sense of dislocation on the part of the traveller. The latter lives on the edge of two starkly different cultures, civilizations, religions and societies. His peregrination produces weird feelings which are associated with the liminal and the threshold, and which oscillate between the homely and unhomely, the ordinary and the mysterious.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has been studied to retrieve variant forms of semantically decomposable idioms that have no thematic composition for the purpose of determining whether thematic composition is a necessary criterion for idiom variation as claimed by Horn (2003). The syntactic variants searched for include passive, raising, tough-movement, relative clauses and wh-questions. Horn’s (2003) hypothesis is not fully confirmed, as some variation has been found.

The paper studies metaphors used in common people’s passages about sadness on the internet site www.searchquotes.com/search/Sadness. The paper also investigates which sadness metaphors listed in Kövecses (2000) and Esenova (2011) are applied in sadness quotations on the site and finds only a small number of them. However, the quotations instantiate a number of other metaphors not listed by the two authors. The difference may be explained by the fact that linguistic expressions in Kövecses’s and Esenova’s corpora describe what people feel when they say they are sad, whereas sadness quotations present what people understand by the concept of sadness.

One of the most distinctive linguistic characteristics of academic writing is the high frequency of nominalized structures. The present study explores how nominalization was used as an approach to making knowledge claims in applied linguistics research articles. Data comprised the introduction and method sections of 16 empirical papers featuring the IMRD (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion) format, drawn from the most recent issues of 10 journals, with a total of 40,122 running words, from which 3,150 instances of nominalization were drawn. Analyzing these nominalized structures in the cotext of their local spans revealed 15 patterns, with the preference for some of the patterns varying across the introduction and method sections of these articles. Results showed a higher concentration of nominalization in the introductions. The study also identified the more prevalent nominal expressions in each section. The fact that each of these sections serves different purposes appears to justify the use of a contrasting range of nominal expressions. Based on the findings of this study, some pedagogical implications for academic writing and reading, ESP/EAP courses, and researchers are proposed.

This paper examines translator training programmes in Hungary and the USA. Programmes operated by different institutions reveal greater differences of structure and content in the US than in Hungary. Most US programmes offer training in Spanish-English translation/interpreting, with a number of European and Asian languages also available, whereas in Hungary the dominant foreign languages are English and German, with other languages having a relatively marginal role. The number of training programmes, relative to economic needs, seems adequate in Hungary, while in the US there are far fewer than would be needed, in view of employment growth projections

There is a close relationship between language and identity, and, consequently, any process of foreign language acquisition will exert a certain influence on the learners’ overall sense of identity. In the case of English learning, the situation is even more complex, since this foreign language is commonly perceived as a key to global access. The paper will discuss the role played by the English instruction in the process of developing multiple identities in a multicultural Europe and beyond, taking into account research data based on both the input offered by the English textbooks meant for high school level, and the Romanian students’ perceptions in this respect.

The study analyses the profile of the potential candidate sitting the Cambridge Preliminary Test. It joins a research trend focused on understanding the role of and attitudes to the Cambridge examinations in Romania.

Among well-established standard operating strategies and methodologies aimed at improving students’ multi-layered translation competence, corpus linguistics has given impulse to new interdisciplinary standpoints. Plugging in cutting edge toolkits, corpus use envisages real-life translation training in compliance with current market demands. The paper underpins specialised corpus design, using MAXQDA as an interactive tool meant to build translators’ functional autonomy.

The aim of the present teacher development initiative is twofold: to help EFL teachers develop critical reflection skills through various means such as video recording, journal writing, peer observation and a support group and to create what Hargreaves (cited in Johnston 2009) calls a “culture of collaboration”. It is believed that teachers, students and the educational institution as a whole would benefit from such an initiative.

Just as one’s foreign language skills may be assessed on the basis of the Common European Framework of Reference, so may literary translators’ competences be evaluated following the criteria listed in the PETRA-E Framework of Reference for the Education and Training of Literary Translators. The article reports on the results obtained on the basis of a small-scale investigation aimed at diagnosing the competences of 1st year Translation Studies MA students at the West University of Timișoara, where the authors teach. The investigation covered one month of the fall semester, during which the students were asked to translate a short story (O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi¸ 1906) and perform a number of other tasks set in accordance with the PETRA-E descriptors for early career translators’ competences. The paper rounds off with the conclusions of the investigation, which may prove useful in outlining directions in literary translators’ training.

The objective of this paper is to formulate an acceptable definition of teacher quality based on effective use of time during the teaching process. Assessing teacher quality is hampered by the complexity of intersecting criteria in teaching profession. Quality is often defined broadly and in general concepts isolated from the actual classroom processes. Society, politicians, parents, educators proclaim that the quality of teachers matters, but it is difficult to come to a consensus, which markers of teacher quality can be measured reliably and which of these elements do have crucial impact on teaching. The major goal of this paper is to clarify what efficiency means in the teaching-learning process if time is taken as the main criterion; how knowledge can be defined and how teacher efficiency can be used as an objective marker of quality in teaching profession.

The paper underpins a process-oriented approach to translation with a view to quality assurance at the internal level, i.e. raising translation trainees’ awareness of the recurrent problems associated with referential, grammatical and lexical accuracy and, last but not least, compliance with stylistic conventions (text/discourse specificities, pragmatic use, etc.). Therefore, we advocate feedforwarding instead of feedback, acting prospectively rather than retrospectively.