Childhood’s crossings: rites of initiation in "Campo Geral" by Guimarães Rosa and "Terra sonâmbula" by Mia Couto

The present work analyses, under an anthropologic perspective, each one of the phases of the rites of passage lived by the protagonists of Guimarães Rosa’s Campo geral and Mia Couto’s Terra sonâmbula, trying to track in these texts the elements related to the traditional societies’ culture and trying to identify the meaning of the mentioned elements in the specific context of the authors. The two writers mix these primitive components with the regional culture and therefore achieve, starting also from the local representations, to reach a universal extent.

Piscolabis (‘snack’): etymological proposals, variations and entries

This article focuses on the study of the word piscolabis. A review of the possible etymological origins put forward in the relevant literature is first presented. This evinces that the difficulties to offer one single (and safe) etymology probably stem from the lack of documents that record the word under study and that date back to the time when it was first used. This historical account also shows that piscolabis has had different variant forms before and after the dictionary of the Spanish Academy (DRAE) established the current one. Finally, the semantic development that the word has undergone is also provided, which allows us to question the suitability of the entry the word has been assigned in the current edition of the DRAE.

Standardization in the Pre-Columbian Pottery from El Caño, Panama: Specialization, Productivity and Consumption

The pottery found in the burials of El Cano is uniform in style to these made in the coclesanos valleys between 700 and 1000 AD. The coefficient of variability of the different pottery forms, evidence diverse standardizations values for polychrome and non-polychrome ceramics. Moreover, data of funerary contexts from the Cano recently excavated, suggest that elite has controlled ceramic production. This control over the production of certain goods reveals that these were important in the support or proper operational of the chiefdoms in Panama and mark the phase of splendour of this culture.

The Techialoyan Codices and their Number

In this article, it is proposed a brief revision of the number of Techialoyan codices. To do this, the text starts with a definition of the corpus, that it is composed of manuscripts done between the half of the 17th century and beginning of the next. Around these documents there are many doubts and it remains much to do. In this case, we present a review around the lists and catalogues to see the changes of the group through time. Our conclusion is that is necessary recount the corpus, because there are fragmented documents and others are unknowns or copies. Finally, we show our count, that leaves the number less than fifty-six documents catalogued until today.

Fiction and reality in "The Kindly Ones" of Jonathan Littell

This paper studies the novel The Kindly Ones, whose main plot charts the anguished memories of a Nazi officer. The reader of this novel is plunged into the harshest atrocities of the Holocaust and WWII, as these are recounted by a perverse conscience who is unmoved by the most terrible actions. Fiction and reality are contrasted in the novel against the framework of history writing and the subsequent debates sparked by historical elaboration. This novel perceptively captures historical truth, thus calling for critical attention upon the collective responsibility which will prevent the repetition of events.

Some Remarks on Quality in Interpreting, Interpreting Modes and the Interpreter’s Role

Quality in interpreting is a hotly debated issue whose complexity is determined by a mix of factors. In this article I analyze it in the light of the role played by interpreters, stressing how the constraints imposed by the different interpreting modes, the different roles actually played by professionals (who become more or less visible, even within the same assignment) and the expectations they generate require the adoption of a flexible perspective when it comes to identifying and assessing quality criteria and drafting professional codes that are open enough to adjust to diverse communicative settings and to the dynamic character of quality.

Literary Translation Teaching: Methodological and Formative Proposals

This essay deals with the teaching of literary translation in a university context from a methodological perspective. The study is firstly framed within the PACTE principles regarding the acquisition of translation competences; then, we proceed to analyze and discuss three relevant aspects to the practice and the teaching of literary translation: i) the approach to style; ii) the explicit differentiation between dialogue and narration; and iii) some issues related to the literary translation market. In order to achieve the proposed objectives, the essay is widely illustrated with translation examples taken from the classroom.

Mental logic and its difficulties with disjunction

The mental logic theory does not accept the disjunction introduction rule of standard propositional calculus as a natural schema of the human mind. In this way, the problem that I want to show in this paper is that, however, that theory does admit another much more complex schema in which the mentioned rule must be used as a previous step. So, I try to argue that this is a very important problem that the mental logic theory needs to solve, and claim that another rival theory, the mental models theory, does not have these difficulties.

Multilingualism and conceptual modelling

One of the leading motivations behind the multilingual semantic web is to make resources accessible digitally in an online global multilingual context. Consequently, it is fundamental for knowledge bases to find a way to manage multilingualism and thus be equipped with those procedures for its conceptual modelling. In this context, the goal of this paper is to discuss how common-sense knowledge and cultural knowledge are modelled in a multilingual framework. More particularly, multilingualism and conceptual modelling are dealt with from the perspective of FunGramKB, a lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language understanding. This project argues for a clear division between the lexical and the conceptual dimensions of knowledge. Moreover, the conceptual layer is organized into three modules, which result from a strong commitment towards capturing semantic knowledge (Ontology), procedural knowledge (Cognicon) and episodic knowledge (Onomasticon). Cultural mismatches are discussed and formally represented at the three conceptual levels of FunGramKB.

A cognitive study of polysemy in Chinese 手 shǒu and Spanish mano ‘hand’

When studying polysemy in Chinese and Spanish, a cognitive approach shows what is common in the polysemous patterns of both languages, so that we can make generalizations applicable to other languages and other semantic phenomena of language. The paper’s hypothesis is that there are universal mechanisms of semantic extension that can be highlighted and can be used in teaching and learning languages.

Correlation between anxiety and academic self-concept in interpreter trainees

This paper focuses on two basic issues: the anxiety-generating nature of the interpreting task and the relevance of interpreter trainees’ academic self-concept. The first has already been acknowledged, although not extensively researched, in several papers, and the second has only been mentioned briefly in interpreting literature. This study seeks to examine the relationship between the anxiety and academic self-concept constructs among interpreter trainees. An adapted version of the Foreign Language Anxiety Scale (Horwitz et al., 1986), the Academic Autoconcept Scale (Schmidt, Messoulam & Molina, 2008) and a background information questionnaire were used to collect data. Students’ t-Test analysis results indicated that female students reported experiencing significantly higher levels of anxiety than male students. No significant gender difference in self-concept levels was found. Correlation analysis results suggested, on the one hand, that younger would-be interpreters suffered from higher anxiety levels and students with higher marks tended to have lower anxiety levels; and, on the other hand, that younger students had lower self-concept levels and higher-ability students held higher self-concept levels. In addition, the results revealed that students with higher anxiety levels tended to have lower self-concept levels. Based on these findings, recommendations for interpreting pedagogy are discussed.

Imperative, subjunctive, and the desiderative-appellative space in Spanish

After defining the “enunciative scheme” (sentence type) as a communicative unit, the imperative is characterized as a morphologized modality of appellative kind used when the following conditions occur: appellative meaning, 2nd person, future tense and absence of negation. In Spanish, any variation of any of these requirements determines that the subjunctive is used. We reject the idea that the imperative is a variant of subjunctive specialized in appellative function and that both modes share a desiderative morpheme. Working in this way means attributing to a morphological category of the verb a property that actually corresponds to the enunciative schemes (sentence types). We propose to integrate the imperative and subjunctive in the framework of what we call the “desiderative-appellative space”. This “space” brings together various grammatical or grammaticalized means based on the imperative and the subjunctive. Semantically, it is organized around a component of desirability (action appears as desirable) that, by varying several factors, configures a route that goes from a center (the imperative) to a periphery (the expression of desire).