Translation as a resource for the teaching of linguistic diversity in foreign language

Translation has played many roles in foreign language teaching. It has been, on the one hand, considered a fundamental methodological tool, constituting the core of the grammar-translation approach, and, on the other hand, heavily criticized and excluded from the classroom, whether from the practical or the theoretical point of view. Currently, with the communicative approach to language teaching, the study of language varieties has become very important to the learner, and considering the need to understand and interpret the meaning of a word within a specific socio-cultural context during the translation process, it is of paramount importance to acknowledge sociolinguistic variations in the text to be translated. Thus, our goal is to show, through a reflective analysis, that translation can be an educational resource for the teaching of linguistic diversity in foreign language. This study isbased on theoretical assumptions on translation dating from the time of Cicero and Saint Jerome to the present times.

Semantic and context-based retrieval of digital cultural objects [Published in Chinese]

Cultural objects are increasingly generated and stored in digital form, yet effective methods for their indexing and retrieval still remain an important area of research. The main problem arises from the disconnection between the content-based indexing approach used by computer scientists and the description-based approach used by information scientists. There is also a lack of representational schemes that allow the alignment of the semantics and context with keywords and low-level features that can be automatically extracted from the content of these cultural objects. This paper presents an integrated approach to address these problems, taking advantage of both computer science and information science approaches. We firstly discuss the requirements from a number of perspectives: users, content providers, content managers and technical systems. We then present an overview of our system architecture and describe various techniques which underlie the major components of the system. These include: automatic object category detection; user-driven tagging; metadata transform and augmentation, and an expression language for digital cultural objects. In addition, we discuss our experience on testing and evaluating some existing collections, analyse the difficulties encountered and propose ways to address these problems.

Understanding learning and teaching : elementary teacher trainers in Papua New Guinea engaged in cultural authorship in the context of national educational reform

Over the last decade, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has pursued educational reform in elementary teacher education. Because elementary teachers and teacher education are central to the reform agenda, there is a need to gain empirical evidence about how PNG teacher trainers’ understandings about learning and teaching impact on their practice. The study uses cultural-authorship as a theoretical framework to investigate the nature of changes in understanding about learning and teaching for 18 teacher trainers as they progressed through a two-year Bachelor of Early Childhood upgrade course. It addresses the research question: What do elementary teacher trainers in PNG understanding about learning and teaching and how has this changed during their course? The focus on such understandings provides valuable insights into their professional identities at a critical time in PNG’s education reform agenda. Analysis of journal entries at the beginning and end of the course showed that, over time, teacher trainers described increasingly more complex ways of understanding learning and teaching. These views shifted from a focus on learning and teaching as transmission of ideas to one in which the critical role played by communities and families in educational processes and the teacher as a change agent became focal. This watershed finding demonstrates notable shifts in teacher trainers’ professional identities from trainers to community leaders in elementary education.

Online Gaming in Context : the Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet. This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.

The entitled tourist: The influence of psychological entitlement and cultural distance on tourist judgments in a hotel context

This research examines how a tourist’s degree of psychological entitlement (sense of deservingness) influences their responses to hotels that differ in cultural distance. Using a visit to China by Western tourists as a context, an experiment shows that entitled tourists respond more negatively to high cultural distance hotel environments compared with low cultural distance environments. Results are mediated by tourist irritation. Research contributions include demonstrating how entitlement moderates cultural distance effects, revealing tourist irritation as a mechanism that explains these effects, and showing how psychological entitlement influences how tourists react to hotel environments when visiting a foreign destination.

Remembrance of the ancestors in contemporary paganism: Lineage, identity, and cultural belonging in the Irish context

This article explores some of the ways of remembering and honouring the ancestors in contemporary Pagan religious traditions, with a focus on the Irish context. An overview is provided of how the "ancestors" are conceptualised within Paganism, as well as where they are believed to be located in the afterlife or Otherworld. Veneration of ancestral peoples is a significant part of many Pagan rituals. Some methods of honouring the dead, and contacting the dead, through ritual practices are described. Remembering and honouring the dead, whether distant forebears or more recent relatives, is particularly important during the Pagan celebration of the festival of Samhain, feast of the dead, on October 31. Issues around ancestors, lineages and ethnicity are significant in many Pagan traditions, and attention is paid to these factors in terms of the Irish Pagan community's sense of cultural belonging as well as their sense of place in a physical respect in relation to the landscape, proximity of sacred sites, and other features of their geographical location.

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar: Cultural and Digital Labour in the Context of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being

The task of this work is to apply thoughts from Georg Lukács’ final book, the Ontology of Social Being, for the theoretical analysis of cultural and digital labour. It discusses Lukács’ concepts of work and communication and relates them to the analysis of cultural and digital work. It also analyses his conception of the relation of labour and ideology and points out how we can make use of it for critically understanding social media ideologies. Lukács opposes the dualist separation of the realms of work and ideas. He introduces in this context the notion of teleological positing that allows us to better understand cultural and digital labour as well as associated ideologies, such as the engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology, today. The analysis shows that Lukács’ Ontology is in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter still a very relevant book, although it has thus far not received the attention that it deserves. This article also introduces the Ontology’s main ideas on work and culture, which is important because large parts of the book have not been translated from the German original into English. Lukács’ notion of teleological positing is crucial for understanding the common features of the economy and culture.

A Social Institutionalist Perspective on HR Diffusion: Histrorical and Cultural Receptivity to HRM in a Post-Comminist Context

This research considers cross-national diffusion of international human resource management (IHRM) ideas and practices by applying an emergent frame of sociological conceptualisation – ‘social institutionalism’ (SI). We look at cultural filters to patterns of diffusion, assimilation and adoption of IHRM, using Romania as a case study. The paper considers the former Communist system of employment relations, suggesting that through institutionalisation former ways of thinking continued to influence definitions and practice of people management in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The paper provides a new perspective on HRM by discussing the value of SI as a general model for understanding cross-cultural receptivity to HR ideas, sensitising the HR practitioner and academic to institutionalised culture as a historical legacy influencing receptivity to international management ideas.

A Home at School: Building Stronger Indigenous People through Cultural Resurgence in an Urban Ontario Public School Context.

In this thesis, I work through the educational narratives of young Aboriginal women and men as I explore the relationship between cultural programming and student engagement. My analysis is structured through a collaborative Indigenous research project. My overarching task is to explore how a cultural support program, the Native Youth Advancement with Education Hamilton (NYA WEH) Program, offered at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School, located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, attempts to re-imagine Aboriginal education in ways that directly challenge the residential school legacy. In particular, I work to illuminate how particular forms of Aboriginal education are connected to the graduation rates of Aboriginal youth. I argue that the ways in which the NYA WEH Program navigates Native Studies curriculum, relationships, and notions of culture and tradition are significant to the engagement of Aboriginal youth. This research develops theoretical connections between the contemporary experience of Aboriginal social inequality and educational initiatives which attempt to reverse that legacy. By placing the NYA WEH Program narratives side-by-side with literature supporting Aboriginal education for Self-determination, I work to learn how to best support and encourage Aboriginal student engagement in secondary schools across Ontario.

Experiències d'innovació docent en el context de l'EEES: estan preparats els nostres estudiants per al canvi cultural?

L’adaptació a l’EEES comporta un canvi cultural per a les universitats de l’estat espanyol. Desde la perspectiva de la gestió del canvi organitzatiu, marc teòric en el que es sustenta aquest estudi, aquest canvi es pot categoritzar com una reorientació segons la classificació de Nadler i Tushman (1995), donat que es tracta d’un canvi profund, discontinu i radical que s’anticipa als canvis i necessitats de l’entorn. Aquest tipus de canvis requereixen d’una introducció gradual, donat que la seva magnitud qüestiona la identitat i cultura de l’organització, generant moltes resistències. Des d’aquesta literatura es recomana fer un diagnòstic de les forces que afecten al canvi per tal de garantir el seu èxit. En aquest sentit, l’objectiu del present estudi és la identificació de les forces inhibidores del canvi cultural en la URV a partir d’una anàlisi introspectiva de les experiència d’innovació docent en l’assignatura de Pràctiques Integrades I. La metodologia utilitzada per aquest estudi ha estat la introspecció personal subjectiva (Brown & Reid , 1997; Patterson et al., 1998; Holbrook, 2005). L’experiència consistia en l’avaluació de certes competències de saber, saber fer, i saber ser i estar, a través de diferents mètodes d’avaluació docent. Les dades de satisfacció dels estudiants amb la metodologia de l’assignatura es van recollir mitjançant un informe d’opinió anònim i no estructurat que se’ls demanava entregar l’últim dia de classe. Opinions més generals sobre el canvi a l’EEES es van recollir a l’inici de l’assignatura a través d’una sessió de focus group amb cada un dels grups d’activitat de l’assignatura. Son múltiples els estudis que afirmen la conveniència de posar en pràctica noves metodologies i formes d’innovació docent que situïn a l’alumne com a eix central de l’aprenentatge i que avaluïn els seus aprenentatges en funció de l’adquisició de competències (Apodaca, 2006, Bautista et al. 2007, Margalef i Canabal, 2007, Brown i Glasner, 2003). No obstant, els resultats del nostre estudi posen en evidència que una de les principals forces inhibidores per a la gestió del canvi en el sistema docent universitari son les actituds dels alumnes, i en especial les d’aquells alumnes que combinen simultàniament estudis amb l’activitat laboral. Com a resultat de l’anàlisi, es proposen mesures per neutralitzar o eliminar les resistències identificades i es duu a terme una reflexió sobre com s’està duent a terme la gestió del canvi en la universitat

En context : anuari cultural, encreuats i carta de valoraci?? del curs

Resumen basado en el de la publicaci??n

Cross-cultural adaptation of the Work Disability Diagnosis Interview (WoDDI) for the Brazilian context

The Work Disability Diagnosis Interview (WoDDI) is a structured interview guide developed by the University of Sherbrooke, Canada to help clinicians detect the most important work-related disability predictors and to identify one or more causes of prolonged absenteeism. This methodological study aims for the cross-cultural adaptation of the WoDDI for the Brazilian context. The method followed international guidelines for studies of this kind, including the following steps: initial translation, synthesis of translations, back translation, evaluation by an expert committee and testing of the penultimate version. These steps allowed obtaining conceptual, semantic, idiomatic, experiential and operational equivalences, in addition to content validity. The results showed that the translated WoDDI is adapted to the Brazilian context and can be used after training.