FROM BUZZFEED CREATOR TO (IN)DEPENDENT YOUTUBER - MANAGING PRECARIOUS LABOUR THROUGH GOSSIP

Several known Buzzfeed Creators have left the company’s toxic culture by beginning a career as YouTubers. They hoped that their Buzzfeed audience would migrate to support their company-independent channel. Often represented as a move towards independence by creators, cultural production research (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Burgess et al. 2020) has shown that creators are platform and audience dependent for viability. Therefore, we are questioning whether being an (in)dependent YouTuber would be more precarious than being an employed Buzzfeed creator. How does the migration from Buzzfeed to YouTube creator offer both independence and a host of new contingencies? Situating a content and discourse analysis of “Why I left Buzzfeed” YouTube videos and comments within academic and popular discourse, we understand these videos as sources of ‘gossip’ (Bishop, 2018) defined as “loose, unmethodological talk that is generative” (2590). Gossip can be beneficial to ex-Buzzfeed creators building on their Buzzfeed association to boost algorithmic visibility. Additionally, gossip is a valuable form of knowledge exchange for content creators to stay informed on discourse, support one another, and communicate their perspective on former Buzzfeed content. Gossip also allows us as researchers to break through the blackbox of YouTube content creation to better comprehend precarity as multifaceted. We hypothesize that creators have to balance different aspects of precarity depending on Buzzfeed as employer or YouTube as distributor. The imaginary of independence is a false friend as both employed and self-employed creators are dependent on platform governance and their platform public (Mniestri & Gekker, 2020) for success.

Synonymic Traps in Selected English Lexical Semantics Terms

The paper zooms in on terminological and conceptual scrutiny of selected eight English lexical semantics terms with the aim of pointing out their terminological synonymy, which is often misrecognized by English linguistics undergraduates. Does a ‘loose synonym’ denote in lexical semantics the same thing as a ‘partial synonym’ or ‘cognitive synonym’? Is the cognitive content of the term ‘false friend’ identical with that of a ‘pseudosynonym’ or ‘paronym’? What aspects of the semantic continuum are shared and non-shared by the selected terms? These questions are at the core of this contribution which can serve didactic purposes of English linguistics teaching. The desk research findings are part of semantic and lexicographic studies and aspire to forewarn English linguistics undergraduates of conceptual misinterpretations in common lexical semantics terms. The paper operates from the perspective of cultural linguistics across the Anglophone semantic continuum. It is based on a tailored Sharifian’s premise [2015] that the metalanguage of English lexical semantics is a repository of cultural conceptualizations that leave traces in its current terminological practice. The study suggests that some English lexical semantics terms offer a considerable space for their synonymic treatment, however, to the detriment of their correct conceptual decoding. The credit of the paper lies in raising undergraduates’ awareness of metalinguistic terminology but also in increasing their conceptual fluency in the selected terms.

Humour as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of English and German equivocal words

This article proves statistically the effectiveness of humour in the teaching of English and German to Spanish students of foreign languages. The referred lexicon is particularly troublemaking because of the difficulties that such vocabulary poses for Spanish learners of not-Latin-originated languages. The approach followed is a quantitative and contrastive analysis and was carried out with four groups of Spanish learners. The experimental groups (one for each language) were presented with the input they were supposed to learn in sentences and contexts in which the use of the English/German term, with the meaning of its Spanish ‘false friend’, resulted in nonsensical and highly humorous utterances. The presentation of the same lexical items to the control groups was more neutral and deliberately bereft of humour. After that, the participants were set a test to find out whether or not they remembered the proper sense of the lexicon taught and could also use it correctly. The results are conclusive and the outcome strongly supports the beneficial effects of pedagogical humour in the language classroom. Keywords: Humour, English as a foreign language, German as a foreign language, L2 resources, motivation, vocabulary development.

Working with Bilingual Corpora to Enhance Legal Translation Competence

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.