Analysing Linguistic Stylistic Devices in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and So Long a Letter: A Comparative Appraisal

This research work focuses on linguistic stylistic analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. It aims to identify the various translation procedures used in each novel in order to establish a comparison between the different translation procedures and style of each translator of modern and old English. A sampling method has been used to carry out this research work. Thus, one extract has been selected with its corresponding translation from the French and English versions of each novel. The results show that, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the translator has used predominantly adaptation for his translation representing 32.32% in both selected extracts whereas in So Long a Letter, the translator has adopted predominantly literal translation representing a proportion of 28.48% in order to preserve the sustained register of the source text. However, both translators have also used other translation procedures in lower proportions depending on the context orientation. It has been noted that translation methods such as calque has been used only once whereas borrowing is nonexistent in the selected extracts from both literary works.

Mobile payments: A proposal for a context-oriented approach based on socio-technical theory

A recent review of mobile payment research by Dahlberg et al. (2015) concludes that there is a need to synthesise this research area by studying contexts in which innovation is carried out and to integrate different aspects of research. This article aims to provide a proposal for how to achieve such integration and context orientation by building on previous studies and offering an additional review. Our systematic literature review of mobile payments research is focused on papers published during 2006–2016. The main objective is to examine how mobile payments research has been conducted from the methodological and theoretical perspectives. Our findings show that research on mobile payments is a multidisciplinary research. Three main themes in the research (in line with previous studies) are customer adoption, technological aspects, and business aspects. Moreover, research is mainly analytical based on a deductive approach. To meet the challenge formulated in the previous research, we propose and apply a socio-technical system framework to achieve synthesis and context-specific consideration in future research on mobile payments.

Mobile payments: A proposal for a context-oriented approach based on socio-technical theory

A recent review of mobile payment research by Dahlberg et al. (2015) concludes that there is a need to synthesise this research area by studying contexts in which innovation is carried out and to integrate different aspects of research. This article aims to provide a proposal for how to achieve such integration and context orientation by building on previous studies and offering an additional review. Our systematic literature review of mobile payments research is focused on papers published during 2006–2016. The main objective is to examine how mobile payments research has been conducted from the methodological and theoretical perspectives. Our findings show that research on mobile payments is a multidisciplinary research. Three main themes in the research (in line with previous studies) are customer adoption, technological aspects, and business aspects. Moreover, research is mainly analytical based on a deductive approach. To meet the challenge formulated in the previous research, we propose and apply a socio-technical system framework to achieve synthesis and context-specific consideration in future research on mobile payments.

Managing criticisms in US-based and Taiwan-based reality talent contests

This research studied how English and Chinese speakers encode their criticisms in the media discourse, aiming to explore the correlation between the speakers’ applications of pragmalinguistic strategies and their sociocultural orientations. Criticisms analyzed in the present study were collected from evaluative communications elicited from the US-based talent competition Project Runway and the Taiwan-based talent competition Super Designer. The current analysis of the face attack act referred to Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework and face notion. The results showed different frequencies of criticizing strategies and redressive devices in the English and Chinese sub-corpora. In addition, the findings also manifested some cross-language variations in pragmalinguistic representation of the same criticizing strategy. The discrepancies were discussed from the perspective of context orientation of the American and Taiwanese societies, evidencing the strong linkage between the speakers’ communication patterns and the cultural norms of their social networks.