Videojuegos y Educación Literaria. Narrativas transmedia en las constelaciones literarias

Actualmente, la sociedad denuncia la cada vez más acuciante desidia lectora en los estudiantes de Educación Secundaria. Es habitual escuchar que las causas de la misma se encuentran en las horas que los adolescentes dedican a la televisión, a Internet y a los videojuegos. Lejos de alimentar el rechazo a estos soportes lúdicos, este estudio se plantea que se han convertido en una parte fundamental de la cultura de los jóvenes y que, además, no solo no disuaden de la lectura, sino que están relacionados con ella y, en muchísimos casos, dependen de la misma para su propio desarrollo. No es posible imaginar un RPG (Role-Playing Game), una aventura gráfica o una visual novel sin texto escrito y es indudable que quienes emplean estos soportes están leyendo continuamente. Se plantea, pues, la posibilidad de emplear los videojuegos en el área de Didáctica de la Lengua y la Literatura como elementos viables para el desarrollo de la competencia lectoliteraria en los alumnos de Educación Secundaria, gracias a su papel como elementos transmedia y su fácil inclusión en las constelaciones literarias de cada uno de los alumnos.

Word-formation and the translation of Marvel comic book charactonyms

This article analyzes the solutions given in Spanish translations to the morphological creativity shown in the names of Marvel comic book characters. The English versions almost invariably provide a full description of the hero (or villain) by means of a wide variety of word-formation mechanisms leading to highly expressive charactonyms. Indeed, examples shall be listed of names of comic book heroes created through compounding, derivation, including prefixation or suffixation (both classical and Anglo-Saxon but also from other origins), lexical blending, abbreviation, clipping, onomatopoeia, and borrowings from Spanish or from other languages. Early translations into Spanish seemed to be slightly less expressive than the original, even when the same word-formation mechanism was used, usually due to either problems of transparency mainly in some of the word parts or to translation constraints. In later periods, a number of factors, including the influence from other media featuring the same characters and the general trend towards globalization through English, have led translators to choose repetition as the most frequent strategy, which has almost eliminated the creative power of wordformation mechanisms in Spanish and their ability to convey the stylistic effects found in the English versions.

Issues in On-Line Legal Translation Teaching

A description is given of the structure of, theoretical background of, and experiences gained from, a course in legal English-Spanish translation taught at the University of Alicante.

Publishing and impact criteria, and their bearing on Translation Studies: In search of comparability

This paper questions the current concept of quality as used in research assessment rankings and peer review, with special reference to the link often established between impact and the way this impact is measured in the form of citation counting. Taking translation studies as a case study, we will offer a two-level approach to reveal both the macro- and micro-level biases that exist in this regard. We will first review three key aspects related to the idea of the quality of publications, namely peer review, journal indexing, and journal impact factor. We will then pinpoint some of the main macro-level problems regarding current practices and criteria as applied to translation studies, such as Thomson Reuters World of Science's journal coverage, citation patterns, and publication format. Next we will provide a micro-textual and practical perspective, focusing on citation counts and suggesting a series of corrective measures to increase comparability.