Volume 15 (2018): Edizione 1 (December 2018)

The raw material of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest was extracted from the 1989 Revolution in Romania and chiselled to the essence. The play bridges reality and fiction through a cross-cultural perspective, which implies documentation, collaborative work and emotional detachment. The British playwright used innovative devices and adapted pictorial techniques to turn the Romanian Revolution into a work of art, to preserve what she considered particular and also connect the event to several of the cultural symbols Romania is associated with.

It is critical common knowledge that domestic narratives and the structure of traditional domesticity are subverted in Gothic fiction (Smith 2013). The household and its apparent security are threatened from within by unknown supernatural forces. What seems familiar becomes upsetting, strange and ‘unfamiliar’. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat” give comparable views on American domesticity, both questioning two important aspects of domestic life (family and a blissful household). The two writers create a mad discourse in which the inexplicable and the uncanny infiltrate into reality and the sentimental domestic narrative is undermined.

Bernard Shaw describes the important role of play in the cultural development of the individual with his famous quotation: “We don’t cease to play because we grow old; we grow old because we cease to play.” On the other hand, Donald Winnicott summarizes his basic thesis claiming that “Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested as play.” In this study, I aim to analyse how the mysterious interaction between mother and child appears in Bruce Holland Rogers’s story named Little Brother^TM through the lens of Freud’s, Jung’s and Winnicott’s theories.

It is no secret that, over the past three decades, Romanian migrants have contributed to an ambivalent image of Romania and that cultural stereotypes have heavily influenced the negative portrayal of Romanians in European media, particularly so in the case of British newspapers (cf. Mădroane 2014). Among the people who have fought against such stereotypes is the Prince of Wales, who has endeavoured to promote a thoroughly positive image of Transylvania (and, by extension, of Romania) with its natural beauties, resources and traditions. What this paper aims to do is to explore this aspect as well as its effects in Romanian newspapers over a period of approximately eight years (2011-2018).

This article dwells on three of Hemingway’s canonical short stories, set in Italy. While not entirely autobiographical, they deal with Hemingway’s inner turmoil caused by his experience during World War I. From its inarticulate nature, pain half emerges into conversations between patients and physicians in A Very Short Story and In Another Country, but disappears into silence in A Way You’ll Never Be. The paper argues that the nature of physical and mental wounds, whether visible or concealed, fails objectification.

This essay examines the concept of the past in Graham Swift’s Last Orders, showing that it is illustrated through symbols in a postmodernist manner, being associated with the figure of a dead character perceived as a living presence and with a book whose analysis can offer multiple interpretations. Focusing on the symbols of the past and evincing the metafictional condition of Graham Swift’s novel, this essay remarks that the past is open to the readers’ analysis and different interpretations.

The wide range of technological devices available today have clearly influenced the structure of the typical English lesson and have created new roles for the teachers and the learners of this foreign language. Starting from the case of the Romanians learners of English, the paper presents a theoretical and research approach to the manner in which multimedia technology can positively influence the development of the students’ life skills, drawing attention, at the same time, to the situations when important skills are better built and fostered by means of other teaching strategies.

The present article focuses on dubbing understood as a creative process of “adapting” the source language script/verbalized message/soundtrack to the target language script/verbalized message/soundtrack, challenging principles such as fidelity versus freedom in translation, bringing once again to our attention the much debated ‘reality’ pinpointed by the Italian adage “traduttore tradittore”, yet not from the point of view of untranslatability, but from that of the need for “transadaptation” in the interlingual transfer required by the audiovisual industry.

The paper focuses on the Sadomasochism of the Lebanese novelist, poet and diplomat Tawifq Yusuf Awwad, due to the horrible childhood which has shaped his character. When the First World War broke out he was three years old, and when the terrible famine killed two-thirds of the people of Mount Lebanon in 1916 he witnessed these scenes of death, I attempt to investigate how such scenes affected on his life and depicted in his early writings.

The present study stems from the question of the type of mechanisms which drive viewers to root for the main character in a movie, and it focuses on key scenes in the movie Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018), which develop the main character’s personality and endear him to the audience.

If synonymy implies both a degree of similarity as well as difference between synonymous terms, the present paper will give a brief account of the similarities and differences between the meanings of active and passive voice corresponding constructions in both English and Romanian with a view to highlight the contrast as well as the similarity between language systems.

The paper looks at the afterlife of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as envisaged by detective fiction writer and theorist P.D. James who imagines, in one of her novels, a sequel to the famous Regency book. This intertextual connection is analysed in terms of reader orientedness, the paper describing a survey that was conducted by the two authors among MA students in humanities at the West University of Timișoara and the conclusions that were reached after processing the data of the survey.

This article aims to offer some insight into manifestations of language contact in the particular case of English and Romanian. It focuses on lexical, morpho-syntactic, semantic and discourse-related aspects of the influence of the former in the context of the latter. In particular, after pointing out the areas in which anglicization is especially obvious, attention is paid to: the adaptation of anglicisms so as to fit Romanian syntactic patterns; code switching and its functions; borrowing-triggered semantic change; lexical-semantic calques; and patterns of English written genres imposing new standards for equivalent Romanian genres.

The primary purpose of this article is to propose standard Serbian terminological expressions for 140 English telecommunications and postal traffic terms. To achieve this aim, we adopt a synchronic lexico-semantico-translation approach and develop an eight-principle translation and standardisation model. The results of the study clearly show that Anglicisms, synonymous and polysemous terminological units, terminological gaps and imprecise translation terms cause problems. Some solutions are suggested to bridge terminological inaccuracy and to set the standard status of certain Serbian terms.

This article looks into the experience of using parallel and comparable corpora in the training of future legal English translators and interpreters between English and Montenegrin. Both corpora have been used extensively for many years, but the method has recently been expanded and modified to better meet the specific needs of our trainees and prepare them for the challenges of the competitive market.

The topicalisation of the social nature of language stems from the idea that to use language is to perform an action. The overriding criterion for evaluating language use in translation is meaningoriented since translators, as privileged language users, display norm-governed behaviour in particular socio-cultural contexts, agency refers to the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act, and praxis is the action itself.

The present paper treats some of the challenges faced when interpreting very technical presentations, speeches and discussion panels on a very specific training on small boat operations organized by U.S Coast Guard and U.S Embassy in Vlora, Albania. It tries to investigate the interpretation problems which may arise during this kind of translation and the specific skills required by the interpreters to successfully accomplish this really demanding task. The case study method is based on the author’s experience as a consecutive interpreter (English into Albanian and vice-versa) in this training and it will provide specific interpretation challenges along with skills and strategies employed in each case.

Although there has been harmonisation work on translator training, different programmes still show a different focus. The current paper frames a training project aiming at developing Master’s students specialised translation competence while working with bilingual corpora and exploiting technology. Legal translation corpus design, analysis tools and false-friend management are addressed so as to provide further insights into such recurrent matters.