scholarly journals The American 'House of Cards' – A View from a Cultural, Political and Translation-Related Perspective

Linguaculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-125
Author(s):  
Attila Imre

The present article offers an introduction to the relationship between the entertainment and translation industry, arguing that dubbings and subtitles are by-products of the entertainment industry, directly contributing to the success of the show. It also deals with the translator’s competence, offering examples of translation challenges from the (in)famous American TV show, House of Cards, connected to terms and expressions pertaining to general knowledge of the world and of the United States. The Introduction offers an insight into audiovisual translation and its successful branches and explains binge-watching and binge-translation as well, also including several scholars’ analyses of the TV show. The Methodological Background describes how a collection of term bases came into being starting from the original English script and several Romanian subtitles of the episodes of official (DVD-release and Netflix) and amateur (freely available online) versions. This is followed by thirty examples in two sets, discussing the translation of terms belonging to general knowledge and US geopolitics in particular. The Conclusions section discusses the terms of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ translator irrespective of their qualifications, focusing instead on ‘quality assurance’, a rather subjective term. Certain corpus-based findings are also highlighted connected to the possibilities of relying on generalization, explicitation or calque referring to general culture and US politics focusing on the intelligibility of politicotainment, a term recently coined by Riegert.

Author(s):  
Kristina Kironska

Abstract This article combines the study of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy with a case study of Taiwan–Myanmar relations from a perspective of political relations, economic cooperation, and Taiwan’s (un)recognisability in Myanmar—i.e. Taiwan’s soft power in Myanmar. The first part of the paper introduces the policy and compares it with the previous ones, and sheds light on Taiwan’s motivation to engage with Myanmar. It considers the ongoing trade war between the United States and China, due to which investment relocation from China is expected to sharply increase. The second part of the paper provides an insight into the relationship between Taiwan and Myanmar after Myanmar’s state-led political transformation from military rule and economic liberalisation since approximately 2010. It explains the main aspects and determinants of the relationship between two countries that share a neighbouring potential hegemon which they both wish to balance against.


2021 ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie

The telegraph wove its way across the ocean at a time when religion’s role in public life was commonplace. Since then, networks have become more vital to everyday life in easily perceptible ways while religion is considered a less overt part of so-called secular public culture in the United States. The epilogue proposes that the relationship of telegraphic networks to the networks that shape our world today is not causal or continuous but one of resonance in which some elements are amplified and some are damped. The protestant dreams for the telegraph in the nineteenth century—particularly the promise of global unity, the celebration of unprecedented speed and ubiquity, and the fantasy of friction-free communication—reverberate in dreams for the internet and social media today. In cries that the internet makes us all neighbors reverberates the electric pulse of the celebrations of the 1858 cable’s capacity to unite the world in Christian community. And yet, it is not a straight shot from then to now. Some elements have faded, particularly overt religious motifs in imaginaries of technology. The original power of public protestantism in the first network imaginaries continues to resonate today in the primacy of connection.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (04) ◽  
pp. 19-27
Author(s):  
Weixing CHEN

The rise of China has shaken, to some extent, the pillars sustaining the US dominance in the world. Facing structural challenges from China, the United States has responded on three levels: political, strategic and policy. The Donald Trump administration has adopted a hard-line approach while attempting to engage China at the structural level. The China–US relationship is entering uncertain times, and the reconstruction of the relationship could take a decade.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Paola Viviani

The migration of Syrians to America in the 19th and 20th centuries is a major issue which has been widely covered in both fictional and non-fictional literature. Over the same period, many Arab magazines were founded both in North and South America, or “migrated” to those countries. An example is al-Jāmiʿa, which was relocated from Alexandria, Egypt, to New York in 1906, where its founder, the renowned intellectual Faraḥ Anṭūn, was able to undertake a profound study of Western society. Not only did this give him a better insight into that society, but also helped him to better understand the critical issues in his native milieu and the tensions between Turks and Arabs, which often came to the fore, especially when the latter expected the former to help them through important phases of their social, civil, and economic life even in the land they migrated to. This paper analyses an article in al-Jāmiʿa by Nāṣīf Shiblī Damūs, previously published in the epony-mous newspaper, in which Syrian migrants in the United States, with Anṭūn supporting them, lament the indifference of the Ottoman authorities toward them and put forward a number of specific requests, using the magazine as a means of making themselves heard by the entire Arab and Ottoman community throughout the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiri Elvestad ◽  
Lee Shaker

Abstract Around the world, rapid media choice proliferation is empowering audiences and allowing individuals to more precisely tailor personal media use. From a democratic perspective, the relationship between the changing media environment and news use is of particular interest. This article presents a comparative exploration of citizens’ changing orientations towards local, national and international news in two very different countries, Norway and the United States, between 1995 and 2012. Prior research suggests that more media choice correlates with a decrease in news consumption. Our analysis shows a pattern of increasing specialization in news orientation in both countries. We also find that the strongest Norwegian trend is one of specialization while the strongest trend in the United States is one of disconnection. Altogether, the results illustrate how local conditions shape the effects of global technological developments.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 147
Author(s):  
Nur Arif Nugraha

This essay will consider a number of perspectives to determine whether the relationship between China and United States is strategic partnersor strategic competitors. During the Obama administration, the policy toward China oscillates between being strategic partners and strategic competitors since the first time he became President in January 2009 until the present time.  In this essay, I will argue that the relationship between China and the United States should be based on partnership rather than competition considering the strategic position of both countries in the world recently, especially in terms of economic cooperation. However, there is still a sense of competition between them, especially in military sectors. Sometimes, the relationship between them in this sector often brings the tense to their relationship. Keywords: Obama administration, policy, strategic partners, strategic competitors, relationship.


Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert

Pictures wielded considerable power in nineteenth-century society, shaping the way that Americans portrayed and related to one another, and presented themselves. This is not only a history through pictures, but a history of pictures: it departs from most historians’ approaches to images as self-explanatory illustrations, and instead examines those images as largely overlooked primary source evidence. Consuming Identities charts the growth of a commodified image industry in one of the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, from the gold rush to the turn of the twentieth century. The following chapters focus on the circulation of human representations throughout the city of San Francisco and around the world, as well as the cultural dimensions of the relationship between people, portraits, and the marketplace. In so doing, this work traces a critical moment in the shaping of individual modern identities.


Author(s):  
S. Nazrul Islam

Chapter 9 presents the Cordon approach, describing its methods, reviewing its spread across the world, and analyzing its consequences. It discusses the general relationship between river channels and their floodplains and explains the nurturing functions that regular river inundations perform. The chapter then outlines the instruments of the Cordon approach, such as embankments, floodwalls, channelization, and canalization. It goes on to explain the relationship between the Cordon and the Polder approaches and offers a classification of cordons into different types. The chapter reviews the consequences of the Cordon approach, distinguishing between those for river channels and for floodplains. It provides an overview of the experience of the Cordon approach in different parts of the world, focusing on the United States, Europe, and India. It also presents two case studies of the Cordon approach: the Mississippi levee system in the United States and the Huang He River embankments in China.


Text Matters ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Brygida Gasztold

The focus of my article is a unique place, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which connects Yiddish culture with the American one, the experience of the Holocaust with the descendants of the survivors, and a modern idea of Jewishness with the context of American postmodernity. Created in the 1980s, in the mind of a young and enthusiastic student Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center throughout the years has become a unique place on the American cultural map. Traversing the continents and crossing borders, Lansky and his co-workers for over thirty years have been saving Yiddish language books from extinction. The Center, however, has long stopped to be merely a storage house for the collection, but instead has grown into a vibrant hub of Yiddishkeit in the United States. Its employees do not only collect, distribute, digitalize and post online the forgotten volumes, but also engage in diverse activities, scholarly and cultural, that promote the survival of the tradition connected with Yiddish culture. They educate, offering internships and fellowships to students interested in learning Yiddish from across the world, translate, publish, and exhibit Yiddish language materials, in this way finding new users for the language whose speakers were virtually annihilated by the Holocaust. To honour their legacy, a separate project is aimed at conducting video interviews that record life testimonies of the speakers of Yiddish. Aaron Lansky’s 2004 memoir, Outwitting History, provides an interesting insight into the complexities of his arduous life mission. Today, the Center lives its own unique life, serving the world of academia and Yiddishkeit enthusiasts alike.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1137-1148
Author(s):  
JOHN A. THOMPSON

Two central features of global history over the past century have been the pre-eminent power of the United States in world politics and the growth of international organizations. The relationship between these phenomena has been variously interpreted, in ways that reflect theoretical and methodological commitments as well as political perspectives. The Realist school, for whom power relationships are always determinative, have followed Carl Schmitt and E. H. Carr in seeing international institutions, and the norms and laws they uphold, as instruments through which dominant powers seek legitimacy as well as influence. By contrast, liberal theorists have viewed the pursuit of a rule-governed world order, and the development of the idea of a ‘world community’, as a more autonomous and broadly based enterprise, one spurred by increased interdependence and greater concern with matters of common interest to all nations – not least that of avoiding the devastating effects of great power warfare in the modern era. As is usually the case with such analytically sharp distinctions, neither of these positions conveys the whole truth. From the Concert of Europe on, great powers have recognized a collective interest in peace and stability but the growth of international institutions has also been the product of wider ideals and interests. As Mark Mazower has shown in his wide-ranging study, Governing the world, the relationship between the narrower interests of great powers on the one hand and various forms of internationalism on the other has been a complex one, involving elements both of conflict and of congruence. But, Mazower emphasizes, since the Second World War, the structure and activities of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other international organizations have been largely shaped by Washington. A generation earlier, however, the United States did not even become a member of the League of Nations, making it more possible to distinguish between the role of American power and that of other sources of support for international bodies, and also to assess the relationship and comparative importance of these two novel elements in world politics. It is perhaps not surprising that much of the recent scholarship on the international history of the post-First World War period has focused, in one way or another, on this issue.


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