Short reflections on the history of African communication

This article aims to propose a chronological subdivision in the history of African communication. African communication today is one of the most important axes for implementing development strategies, sustaining education, health, and schooling programmes, and so on. However, many of these programmes fail due to a lack of or ineffective communication between international organisations, local elite and lay people. The reasons for this situation must be found in Africa’s history of communication, which has undergone radical transformations in its different phases. Using the functionalist analysis drawn up by Jakobson, this article proposes a new chronological subdivision of Africa’s history of communication, reflecting on the current contradictions in contemporary communication in Africa.

Motivating film title translation: a cognitive análisis

This proposal is a non-quantitative study based on a corpus of real data which offers a principled account of the translation strategies employed in the translation of English film titles into Spanish in terms of cognitive modeling. More specifically, we draw on Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera’s (2014) work on what they term content (or low-level) cognitive operations, based on either ‘stands for’ or ‘identity’ relations, in order to investigate possible motivating factors for translations which abide by oblique procedures, i.e. for non-literal renderings of source titles. The present proposal is made in consonance with recent findings within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (Samaniego 2007), which evidence that this linguistic approach can fruitfully address some relevant issues in Translation Studies, the most outstanding for our purposes being the exploration of the cognitive operations which account for the use of translation strategies (Rojo and Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013: 10), mainly expansion and reduction operations, parameterization, echoing, mitigation and comparison by contrast. This fits in nicely with a descriptive approach to translation and particularly with skopos theory, whose main aim consists in achieving functionally adequate renderings of source texts.