Lost in translation? : Translating allusions in two of Reginald Hill's Dalziel & Pascoe novels

This study examines strategies used to translate various thematic and character delineating allusions in two of Reginald Hill's detective novels, The Wood Beyond and On Beulah Height and their Swedish translations Det mörka arvet and Dalen som dränktes. In this study, thematic allusions and allusions used in character delineation are regarded as intertextual networks. Intertextual networks comprise all the texts that are in one way or another embedded into a text, all the texts referred to in it and even the texts somehow rejected from a text's own canon. Studying allusions as intertextual networks makes it warranted to pay minute attention to even the smallest of details. Seen together, these little details form extensive networks of meaning that readers use to interpret the text. Allusion can be defined as a reference, often covert or indirect, to another text in a way that brings into the text some of the associations of that other text. A text is here understood broadly, hence sources of allusions include all cultural texts from literature and history to cinema and televisions serials. Allusions are culture bound and each culture tends to allude to its own cultural products. The set of transcultural allusions is therefore fairly small. Translation strategies are translatorial ways of solving translation problems. Being culture-bound, allusions are potential translation problems. In order to transmit the thoughts evoked by the allusions in source text readers to the target text readers translators may add guidance to the translated text. Often guidance is not added, which may result in changes in handling of themes or character delineation, clear in the source text but confusing or incomprehensible in the target text. However, norms in target culture may not always allow the translators the possibility to make the text comprehensible. My analyses of translation strategies show that in the two translated novels studied minimum change is a very frequently used strategy. This results in themes and character delineation losing some of the effect they have in the source texts. Perhaps surprisingly, the result is very much the same even where it is possible to discern that the two translators have had differing translation principles. Keywords: allusions, intertextuality, literary translation, translation strategies, norms, crime fiction, Hill, Reginald

MECHANISMS AND EFFECTS OF MITOCHONDRIAL DNA INSTABILITY AND COPY NUMBER MANIPULATION

Defects in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) maintenance cause a range of human diseases, including autosomal dominant progressive external ophthalmoplegia (adPEO). This study aimed to clarify the molecular background of adPEO. We discovered that deoxynucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) metabolism plays a crucial in mtDNA maintenance and were thus prompted to search for therapeutic strategies based on the modulation of cellular dNTP pools or mtDNA copy number. Human mtDNA is a 16.6 kb circular molecule present in hundreds to thousands of copies per cell. mtDNA is compacted into nucleoprotein clusters called nucleoids. mtDNA maintenance diseases result from defects in nuclear encoded proteins that maintain the mtDNA. These syndromes typically afflict highly differentiated, post-mitotic tissues such as muscle and nerve, but virtually any organ can be affected. adPEO is a disease where mtDNA molecules with large-scale deletions accumulate in patients tissues, particularly in skeletal muscle. Mutations in five nuclear genes, encoding the proteins ANT1, Twinkle, POLG, POLG2 and OPA1, have previously been shown to cause adPEO. Here, we studied a large North American pedigree with adPEO, and identified a novel heterozygous mutation in the gene RRM2B, which encodes the p53R2 subunit of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase (RNR). RNR is the rate-limiting enzyme in dNTP biosynthesis, and is required both for nuclear and mitochondrial DNA replication. The mutation results in the expression of a truncated form of p53R2, which is likely to compete with the wild-type allele. A change in enzyme function leads to defective mtDNA replication due to altered dNTP pools. Therefore, RRM2B is a novel adPEO disease gene. The importance of adequate dNTP pools and RNR function for mtDNA maintenance has been established in many organisms. In yeast, induction of RNR has previously been shown to increase mtDNA copy number, and to rescue the phenotype caused by mutations in the yeast mtDNA polymerase. To further study the role of RNR in mammalian mtDNA maintenance, we used mice that broadly overexpress the RNR subunits Rrm1, Rrm2 or p53R2. Active RNR is a heterotetramer consisting of two large subunits (Rrm1) and two small subunits (either Rrm2 or p53R2). We also created bitransgenic mice that overexpress Rrm1 together with either Rrm2 or p53R2. In contrast to the previous findings in yeast, bitransgenic RNR overexpression led to mtDNA depletion in mouse skeletal muscle, without mtDNA deletions or point mutations. The mtDNA depletion was associated with imbalanced dNTP pools. Furthermore, the mRNA expression levels of Rrm1 and p53R2 were found to correlate with mtDNA copy number in two independent mouse models, suggesting nuclear-mitochondrial cross talk with regard to mtDNA copy number. We conclude that tight regulation of RNR is needed to prevent harmful alterations in the dNTP pool balance, which can lead to disordered mtDNA maintenance. Increasing the copy number of wild-type mtDNA has been suggested as a strategy for treating PEO and other mitochondrial diseases. Only two proteins are known to cause a robust increase in mtDNA copy number when overexpressed in mice; the mitochondrial transcription factor A (TFAM), and the mitochondrial replicative helicase Twinkle. We studied the mechanisms by which Twinkle and TFAM elevate mtDNA levels, and showed that Twinkle specifically implements mtDNA synthesis. Furthermore, both Twinkle and TFAM were found to increase mtDNA content per nucleoid. Increased mtDNA content in mouse tissues correlated with an age-related accumulation of mtDNA deletions, depletion of mitochondrial transcripts, and progressive respiratory dysfunction. Simultaneous overexpression of Twinkle and TFAM led to a further increase in the mtDNA content of nucleoids, and aggravated the respiratory deficiency. These results suggested that high mtDNA levels have detrimental long-term effects in mice. These data have to be considered when developing and evaluating treatment strategies for elevating mtDNA copy number.

Monetary Policy, Stock Price Misalignments and Macroeconomic Instability

Perhaps the most fundamental prediction of financial theory is that the expected returns on financial assets are determined by the amount of risk contained in their payoffs. Assets with a riskier payoff pattern should provide higher expected returns than assets that are otherwise similar but provide payoffs that contain less risk. Financial theory also predicts that not all types of risks should be compensated with higher expected returns. It is well-known that the asset-specific risk can be diversified away, whereas the systematic component of risk that affects all assets remains even in large portfolios. Thus, the asset-specific risk that the investor can easily get rid of by diversification should not lead to higher expected returns, and only the shared movement of individual asset returns – the sensitivity of these assets to a set of systematic risk factors – should matter for asset pricing. It is within this framework that this thesis is situated. The first essay proposes a new systematic risk factor, hypothesized to be correlated with changes in investor risk aversion, which manages to explain a large fraction of the return variation in the cross-section of stock returns. The second and third essays investigate the pricing of asset-specific risk, uncorrelated with commonly used risk factors, in the cross-section of stock returns. The three essays mentioned above use stock market data from the U.S. The fourth essay presents a new total return stock market index for the Finnish stock market beginning from the opening of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1912 and ending in 1969 when other total return indices become available. Because a total return stock market index for the period prior to 1970 has not been available before, academics and stock market participants have not known the historical return that stock market investors in Finland could have achieved on their investments. The new stock market index presented in essay 4 makes it possible, for the first time, to calculate the historical average return on the Finnish stock market and to conduct further studies that require long time-series of data.

Magnetorotational instability driven dynamos at low magnetic Prandtl numbers

Numerical simulations of the magnetorotational instability (MRI) with zero initial net flux in a non-stratified isothermal cubic domain are used to demonstrate the importance of magnetic boundary conditions. In fully periodic systems the level of turbulence generated by the MRI strongly decreases as the magnetic Prandtl number (Pm), which is the ratio of kinematic viscosity and magnetic diffusion, is decreased. No MRI or dynamo action below Pm=1 is found, agreeing with earlier investigations. Using vertical field conditions, which allow magnetic helicity fluxes out of the system, the MRI is found to be excited in the range 0.1

Dependence of the large-scale vortex instability on latitude, stratification and domain size

In an earlier study, we reported on the excitation of large-scale vortices in Cartesian hydrodynamical convection models subject to rapid enough rotation. In that study, the conditions for the onset of the instability were investigated in terms of the Reynolds (Re) and Coriolis (Co) numbers in models located at the stellar North pole. In this study, we extend our investigation to varying domain sizes, increasing stratification, and place the box at different latitudes. The effect of the increasing box size is to increase the sizes of the generated structures, so that the principal vortex always fills roughly half of the computational domain. The instability becomes stronger in the sense that the temperature anomaly and change in the radial velocity are observed to be enhanced. The model with the smallest box size is found to be stable against the instability, suggesting that a sufficient scale separation between the convective eddies and the scale of the domain is required for the instability to work. The instability can be seen upto the colatitude of 30 degrees, above which value the flow becomes dominated by other types of mean flows. The instability can also be seen in a model with larger stratification. Unlike the weakly stratified cases, the temperature anomaly caused by the vortex structures is seen to depend on depth.