Translatability problems of Euphemistic Expressions in Najuib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire: A Pragmatic-Stylistic Perspective

This study addresses the question of the problematic translation of Arabic politeness formulas into English in Palace of Desire. The selected translated utterances were critically reviewed using Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness (1987), Culpepper’s Impoliteness framework, and Grice’s Cooperative principle. The study reveals that the translations of politeness formulas may not necessarily jeopardize the translation's overall authenticity, they do however lead to the loss of some of the text’s cultural implications, in the sense that the offered translations remove some stylistic and cultural features that the original author intended their work to have. Received: 21 September 2021 / Accepted: 22 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

Ephemeral mimetics: memes, an X-ray of Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a crisis with consequences for public health, but also with economic, social and cultural implications that have affected all layers of society to a greater or lesser extent. Communication has been impacted by the immediacy and virality of messages and misinformation has galloped across social platforms. Against that backdrop, memes have emerged as a powerful means to channel citizen sentiment. A study of these digital objects is essential to understanding social network-based communication during the pandemic. The qualitative research reported here analyses the role of memes in communication on Covid-19, studies their development and defends their status as one of this generation’s cultural artefacts that, as such, merits preservation. Meme evolution is studied using Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, which has been applied in a number of contexts involving psychological change. Studying memes in those terms both brings information on the evolution of citizens’ concerns to light and proves useful to sound out social media communication around the pandemic media. The challenges to be faced in meme preservation are defined, along with the ways in which heritage institutions should ensure the conservation of these cultural objects, which mirror early twenty-first century communication and world views and in this case provide specific insight into one of the most significant historic circumstances of recent decades.

Narkopowieść latynoamerykańska: rzeczywistość z Szekspirem w tle

Latin American literature is not rich in references to the works of Shakespeare, but rather focuses on its own tradition. The premise on which this article is based, however, is that the reality of the region displays Shakespearean characteristics. The aim of this article is to present a subgenre, or a literary convention, known as a narconovel. The configuration of the represented world in this noir novel variant is determined by the drug trade with its far-reaching social and cultural implications. The narconovel is an important part of the most recent literature in Colombia, Mexico, and other countries of the region. This article addresses associations and disassociations between the narconovel and the crime fiction convention, centering on Shakespearean motifs, related in this case to the concepts of power, crime, guilt, and punishment.

Whose Country Is Digital India? Unpacking Dominant Power Relations Mediated by the Digital India Campaign

This article unpacks the material and cultural implications of the Digital India programme’s rhetoric of social transformation and digital empowerment by asking the question ‘How and whom does digital empowerment seek to empower?’ Through an analysis of the discourse on the Digital India website, this article concludes that the recurring depoliticization and dehistoricization of social differences deliberately make the programme’s intended beneficiaries vague. By flattening structural differences among caste, class, gender, and ethnicity, Digital India’s technopolitics recasts empowerment as an individual issue and naturalizes the myths of meritocracy, castelessness, and genderlessness. Furthermore, in a Hindutva regime, Digital India’s depoliticized technopolitics becomes a tool for managing citizenship that reinforces the status quo. This article argues that, by declining to define a process of empowerment that considers cultural complexities and structural hegemonies, Digital India’s call for digital empowerment remains an empty signifier.

‘God helps those who help themselves’… religion and Assisted Reproductive Technology usage amongst urban Ghanaians

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is increasingly becoming a viable option for infertile couples in Ghana. There exists significant literature that explores the gender, legal, religious and socio-cultural implications of ART usage. In this paper, we expand the discourse on the nexus between religion and ART usage by looking at how the former is used as a frame of reference in the decision-making process, as well as how it is employed to explain treatment successes and failures. Irrespective of religious orientation, there was a general acceptance of ART by participants in the study-with exceptions only when it came to some aspects of the procedure. Even here, participants’ desperate desire to have children, tended to engender some accommodation of procedures they were uncomfortable with because of their religious beliefs. Thus, in contrast to some studies that suggest religion as interfering with ART use, we posit that religion is not an inhibiting factor to ART usage. On the contrary, it is an enabling factor, engendering the agentic attitude of participants to find a solution to their infertility in ART; as well as providing the strength to endure the physical and emotional discomfort associated with the biomedical process of conception and childbirth. In this context, religion thus provides participants with a frame of reference to navigate the spaces between decision-making, treatment processes and outcomes, and attributions of responsibility for the outcomes whatever they may be.

The Abolition and Reconstruction of a Church A Case Study of Christian Localization in Nu Village within the North Sino-Myanmar Boundary

The church is an important place for Christians to practice their faith. It has also become an important symbol to highlight the history memory of the village in the ethnic areas of the North Sino-Myanmar Boundary. Christianity was introduced into Nu people for nearly one hundred years, Christian faith has become an important part of its cultural tradition. A history of the construction of the Christian church is the history of the Christian faith. To explore the process of the construction, abolishment and reconstruction of the Christian church is to reveal the dynamic change process of the Christian faith from the outside to the native. Taking the Christian church in Laomudeng which is a village of Nu people as an example, this paper aims to explore the Socio-cultural implications of “Christian localization” by presenting the religious practices of Nu Christians in building churches in different history periods.

Queer Capital: Transgender Representation in Contemporary American Cinema

<p>From The Crying Game’s shocking gender reveal in 1993, to the resounding success of Pose in 2018, trans characters and narratives have become increasingly visible across media platforms. Most significantly, trans characters have become a key part of American Indiewood cinema. Films like Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Girl, Stonewall, and 3 Generations demonstrate the growing visibility of these roles within the American independent tradition. Moreover, these films’ critical and financial successes, in particular those of Dallas Buyers Club, signal the potential value these characters offer studios as a marker of cultural progressiveness. However, while trans characters in Indiewood films inspire more mainstream conversations about queer identity and community, interrogating these representations reveals how these depictions may reinforce harmful myths about trans identities and experiences. Analysing these representational practices through textual, generic, and industrial analyses, I will demonstrate how trans performances benefit the wider film industry, and question the impact of cis-gender casting on these films’ representational strategies. The purpose of this project is thus to examine performances of transgender identity in contemporary indie and Indiewood films, spotlighting industrial influences on transgender representations. By using Dallas Buyers Club as a case study to explore how queer Indiewood films appeal to mainstream audiences; and using Tangerine to illustrate alternative representational strategies, this thesis demonstrates how contemporary Indiewood cinema excludes most trans writers, directors, and actors, how this process benefits cis-gender industry elites, and how paratexts mitigate the potential threat that trans identities pose to gender categories. More specifically, I pose the questions: how are filmic performances of transgender identity informed by industrial power relations; and, what are the cultural implications of the dynamic between the two.</p>

Lingo-Entrainment: The Natural Language Surveillance Of Smartphone Users

<div><br></div><div>This thesis examines the neuro-cultural implications of: (1) language capture and commodification; and (2) neurological entrainment, two processes that I contend have coextensively emerged with the development of smartphones in a way that is profitable for major smartphone manufacturers and privileged third parties. The phrase “neurological entrainment” in this context refers specifically to the smartphone’s ability to exert affective behavioural control over smartphone users by altering their neurochemical states. I aim to situate this established neurological phenomenon alongside a less scrutinized transformation: that of the smartphone into a site of language-capture. By “language capture” I refer to the intake, collection and brokering of smartphone users’ natural language data and metadata. The goal of this thesis is to contextualize the interfusing of these entrainment and capture processes that cunningly form lucrative linguistic relationships between smartphone users and their devices. This study, through a comparative content analysis of data policies, privacy protocols, and privacy related promotional material pertaining to two major smartphone manufacturers (e.g., Apple and Samsung), substantiates the claim that the foundational documents of each device openly permit this productive union, with its doubled effect of neurological pacification and linguistic divestment. divestment. It also situates these findings within the grander lingo-entrainment systems that influence the future of our living language, and that coincide with Deleuzian premonitions about societies of control.<br></div>