Monitoring policy and actions on food environments: rationale and outline of the INFORMAS policy engagement and communication strategies

 The International Network for Food and Obesity/non-communicable diseases Research, Monitoring and Action Support (INFORMAS) proposes to collect performance indicators on food policies, actions and environments related to obesity and non-communicable diseases. This paper reviews existing communications strategies used for performance indicators and proposes the approach to be taken for INFORMAS. Twenty-seven scoring and rating tools were identified in various fields of public health including alcohol, tobacco, physical activity, infant feeding and food environments. These were compared based on the types of indicators used and how they were quantified, scoring methods, presentation and the communication and reporting strategies used. There are several implications of these analyses for INFORMAS: the ratings/benchmarking approach is very commonly used, presumably because it is an effective way to communicate progress and stimulate action, although this has not been formally evaluated; the tools used must be trustworthy, pragmatic and policy-relevant; multiple channels of communication will be needed; communications need to be tailored and targeted to decision-makers; data and methods should be freely accessible. The proposed communications strategy for INFORMAS has been built around these lessons to ensure that INFORMAS's outputs have the greatest chance of being used to improve food environments.

Information structure and the flow of translation

Translators often follow the established conventions of translations set out by founders like Nida and Taber (1969) or Newmark (1988). The principal convention, one could say, is to adhere to the source text in form and meaning. Another major convention is to keep the flow of the translated text natural, often referred to as ‘readability’ (Baker and Saldanha, 2009; Hatim and Munday, 2004). These two conventions are hard to go together, and one of them is often flouted. To maintain the same position of discoursal elements or information structure of the source text which include thematic information, left-dislocation, contrastiveness, and passive voice in the translated text is not an easy task. This exacerbates the task especially if the source and the target language have different typological features. This paper argues that discoursal elements are determinant in understanding the flow of the texts in the source language and should not, therefore, be frequently switched around in the translated texts to fit the norm of the target language. The order of these information structure elements should be maximally maintained when translating a text into a target language. It is after all the employment of such information structure units by the writer of the source text which is significant at any given point in discourse both cognitively, when processing the text, and interactionally, when communicating with the reader.

The Victorian bushfires and extreme weather events : media coverage, crisis and communication

The 2009 'Black Saturday' Victorian bushfires claimed the lives of 173 people and have become known as the worst fire event in Australian history. Victoria has been at the centre of two other significant Australian fire disasters - 'Black Friday' in 1939 and the 1983 'Ash Wednesday' fires in south-eastern Australia that claimed the lives of 47 people in Victoria. As media scholar and commentator Michael Gawenda has noted, the media not only report an 'event' - like the Victorian bushfires or the tsunami in the South Pacific - but in a sense create and define it. Print and electronic media coverage of extreme weather events therefore raises a multitude of issues about the media's role in serving the community before, during and after a crisis, while also trying to produce the best possible reportage in a competitive industry undergoing dramatic change. This issue of MIA provides a venue for critical, empirical engagement with media coverage and representation, and the role of journalism and journalists in reporting national and international bushfires, tsunamis, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, with a special focus on the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Its goal is to address the ramifications of an industry in flux - indeed, some may say crisis - driven by technological advances, staff reductions and media organisations under financial pressure, and to explore the ways in which such extreme weather events have impacted media practices and policy