Technical metaphor in Spanish-English translation of the fields of blindness, fatigue, and the spiritual world

The correspondence in the Spanish-English translation is analyzed of three different fields of technical metaphors based upon blindness, fatigue, and the spiritual world. Some terms have been left aside that under the appearance of metaphors were mere samples of no-deviated language or cases of homonymy. The study reveals a higher presence of the metaphor in the Spanish language in the three fields of study, although the English language also shows a high index of metaphors. In between metaphors and non-metaphors, we find a lack of metaphorical equilibrium between Spanish and English in certain cases, which is a sign of the different perception of the reality. Finally, the conclusions shed light on the meaning of these words: blind, annoyance, fatigue, antifading, core, angels, espectrum, phantom, ghost, magic, postmortem, dead, etc.

Measuring the Diversity and the Integration of Film Production in Mercosur: A Social Network Analysis

Based on an original and comprehensive database of all feature fiction films produced in Mercosur between 2004 and 2012, the paper analyses whether the Mercosur film industry has evolved towards an integrated and culturally more diverse market. It provides a summary of policy opportunities in terms of integration and diversity, emphasizing the limiter role played by regional policies. It then shows that although the Mercosur film industry remains rather disintegrated, it tends to become more integrated and culturally more diverse. From a methodological point of view, the combination of Social Network Analysis and the Stirling Model opens up interesting research tracks to analyse creative industries in terms of their market integration and their cultural diversity.

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.

Circular migration and the Internet: The role of social networks in the sociocultural context of Mexican residents in Barcelona

This work focuses on the study of the circular migration between America and Europe, particularly in the discussion about knowledge transfer and the way that social networks reconfigure the form of information distribution among people, that due to labor and academic issues have left their own country. The main purpose of this work is to study the impact of social media use in migration flows between Mexico and Spain, more specifically the use by Mexican migrants who have moved for  multiple years principally for educational purposes and then have returned to their respective locations in Mexico seeking to integrate themselves into the labor market. Our data collection concentrated exclusively on a group created on Facebook by Mexicans who mostly reside in Barcelona, Spain or wish to travel to the city for economic, educational or tourist reasons.  The results of this research show that while social networks are spaces for exchange and integration, there is a clear tendency by this group to "narrow lines" and to look back to their homeland, slowing the process of opening socially in their new context.