Adapting health-risk communication to the specific cultural contexts of diverse populations : an assessment of malaria-treatment programs in Liberia

Drawing on theories of technical communication, rhetoric, literacy, language and culture, and medical anthropology, this dissertation explores how local culture and traditions can be incorporated into health-risk-communication-program design and implementation, including the design and dissemination of health-risk messages. In a modern world with increasing global economic partnerships, mounting health and environmental risks, and cross-cultural collaborations, those who interact with people of different cultures have “a moral obligation to take those cultures seriously, including their social organization and values” (Hahn and Inhorn 10). Paradoxically, at the same time as we must carefully adapt health, safety, and environmental-risk messages to diverse cultures and populations, we must also recognize the increasing extent to which we are all becoming part of one, vast, interrelated global village. This, too, has a significant impact on the ways in which healthcare plans should be designed, communicated, and implemented. Because communicating across diverse cultures requires a system for “bridging the gap between individual differences and negotiating individual realities” (Kim and Gudykunst 50), both administrators and beneficiaries of malaria-treatment-and-control programs (MTCPs) in Liberia were targeted to participate in this study. A total of 105 people participated in this study: 21 MTCP administrators (including designers and implementers) completed survey questionnaires on program design, implementation, and outcomes; and 84 MTCP beneficiaries (e.g., traditional leaders and young adults) were interviewed about their knowledge of malaria and methods for communicating health risks in their tribe or culture. All participants showed a tremendous sense of courage, commitment, resilience, and pragmatism, especially in light of the fact that many of them live and work under dire socioeconomic conditions (e.g., no electricity and poor communication networks). Although many MTCP beneficiaries interviewed for this study had bed nets in their homes, a majority (46.34 percent) used a combination of traditional herbal medicine and Western medicine to treat malaria. MTCP administrators who participated in this study rated the impacts of their programs on reducing malaria in Liberia as moderately successful (61.90 percent) or greatly successful (38.10 percent), and they offered a variety of insights on what they might do differently in the future to incorporate local culture and traditions into program design and implementation. Participating MTCP administrators and beneficiaries differed in their understanding of what “cultural incorporation” meant, but they agreed that using local indigenous languages to communicate health-risk messages was essential for effective health-risk communication. They also suggested that understanding the literacy practices and linguistic cultures of the local people is essential to communicating health risks across diverse cultures and populations.

Jordi Arbonès en Argentina : Un traductor del inglés al catalán

Desde su radicación en Argentina en 1956, Jordi Arbonès, nacido en Cataluña, comienza a traducir obras del inglés al catalán. A medida que avanza en el conocimiento de la lengua y cultura de ambas sociedades, recibe pedidos de importantes editoriales para publicar en catalán las obras de autores reconocidos universalmente, permitiendo así la introducción de los mismos en el ámbito catalán, especialmente en el posfranquismo. A su muerte en 2001, tiene unas 150 obras traducidas. En base a su legado, se crea la 'Càtedra Jordi Arbonès' en la Facultat de Traducció i d'Interpretació de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Jordi Arbonès en Argentina : Un traductor del inglés al catalán

Desde su radicación en Argentina en 1956, Jordi Arbonès, nacido en Cataluña, comienza a traducir obras del inglés al catalán. A medida que avanza en el conocimiento de la lengua y cultura de ambas sociedades, recibe pedidos de importantes editoriales para publicar en catalán las obras de autores reconocidos universalmente, permitiendo así la introducción de los mismos en el ámbito catalán, especialmente en el posfranquismo. A su muerte en 2001, tiene unas 150 obras traducidas. En base a su legado, se crea la 'Càtedra Jordi Arbonès' en la Facultat de Traducció i d'Interpretació de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Jordi Arbonès en Argentina : Un traductor del inglés al catalán

Desde su radicación en Argentina en 1956, Jordi Arbonès, nacido en Cataluña, comienza a traducir obras del inglés al catalán. A medida que avanza en el conocimiento de la lengua y cultura de ambas sociedades, recibe pedidos de importantes editoriales para publicar en catalán las obras de autores reconocidos universalmente, permitiendo así la introducción de los mismos en el ámbito catalán, especialmente en el posfranquismo. A su muerte en 2001, tiene unas 150 obras traducidas. En base a su legado, se crea la 'Càtedra Jordi Arbonès' en la Facultat de Traducció i d'Interpretació de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

La competencia comunicativa intercultural en el aula de español de los negocios: análisis de materiales para su enseñanza

RESUMEN La adquisición de la competencia comunicativa intercultural en la enseñanza de Lenguas Extranjeras (LE) y/o Lenguas para Fines Específicos (LFE) debe ser un proceso de aprendizaje consciente y explícito cuyo fin es la transmisión de conocimientos teóricos, el desarrollo de habilidades comportamentales y de actitudes positivas a través del contacto con la/s cultura/s meta. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo general contribuir al desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa intercultural comercial del estudiante de español de los negocios (EN). Para ello se ha realizado un análisis de los manuales para su enseñanza. En concreto, hemos auditado los manuales de EN con el fin de conocer la metodología didáctica que emplean en la enseñanza de la competencia comunicativa intercultural comercial, tomando como marco de referencia el enfoque intercultural para la enseñanza de las Lenguas de los Negocios. Para alcanzar este fin se ha dividido la investigación en tres partes: 1) la revisión de los antecedentes sobre la enseñanza del componente intercultural y del análisis de materiales en los cursos de LFE; 2) la configuración de un constructo teórico que permitiera a la vez, seleccionar el objeto de estudio, diseñar el instrumento de análisis y disponer de un marco de referencia valorativo; 3) y la creación, pilotaje y aplicación del instrumento de análisis, y la auditoría de los datos. Los resultados muestran que, en líneas generales, predomina una visión tradicional de la cultura; un escaso tratamiento de la relación lengua-y-cultura; un seguimiento parcial de los principios pedagógicos para la adquisición de la competencia comunicativa intercultural; un tratamiento bajo de las habilidades interculturales específicas en las interacciones comerciales; y una cobertura parcial de las habilidades interculturales generales, las cuales se centran fundamentalmente en la adqusición de saberes teóricos. PALABRAS CLAVE: competencia comunicativa intercultural; comunicación intercultural comercial; español de los negocios; español para fines específicos; auditoria de manuales didácticos. ABSTRACT The acquisition of intercultural communicative competence in Foreign Language (FL) and / or Languages for Specific Purposes teaching (LSP) must be a conscious and explicit learning to develop knowledge, skills and positive attitudes through contact with the target culture/s. The overall objective of this thesis is to assist the development of the intercultural communicative competence of the student of Spanish for Business (SB) through the audit of the teaching textbooks published in the last decade through a multidisciplinary approach to teaching LSP. The audit was carried out in order to ascertain the underlying approach and course design for the development of the intercultural communicative competence; to state the methodological approach to culture, language-and-culture relationship, culture teaching, culture acquisition and course design. To achieve this objective, the work has been divided into four parts: 1) review of the background on teaching the intercultural component and the analysis of materials in a courses of LSP through a multidisciplinary approach, 2) configuration of a theoretical construct allowing to select the object of study, to design the analytical instrument and to have an evaluative framework, together with the selection of a corpus of Spanish for Business textbooks, 3) development of the analytical instrument and 4) application of the analytical instrument and audit of selected textbooks. The results show that, in the textbooks analyzed, dominated a traditional view of culture, a low ratio treatment of the language-and-culture relationship, a partial implementation of the pedagogical principles for the acquisition of intercultural communicative competence; poor treatment of specific intercultural skills in business interactions, and partial coverage of the general cultural skills, which focus primarily on the acquisition of theoretical knowledge. KEY WORDS: Intercultural communicative competence; Intercultural communicative competence; Spanish for Business; Spanish for Specific Purposes; Textbook audit

Ontology Localization

In the context of the Semantic Web, resources on the net can be enriched by well-defined, machine-understandable metadata describing their associated conceptual meaning. These metadata consisting of natural language descriptions of concepts are the focus of the activity we describe in this chapter, namely, ontology localization. In the framework of the NeOn Methodology, ontology localization is defined as the activity of adapting an ontology to a particular language and culture. This adaptation mainly involves the translation of the natural language descriptions of the ontology from a source natural language to a target natural language, with the final objective of obtaining a multilingual ontology, that is, an ontology documented in several natural languages. The purpose of this chapter is to provide detailed and prescriptive methodological guidelines to support the performance of this activity.

Making or Breaking the Republic of Moldova? The Autonomy of Gagauzia. EDAP 02/2013

This article describes the process of self-determination and the creation of a territorial autonomy of the Gagauz people in the Republic of Moldova. It also analyses the situation in the autonomy after the change of government in Chisinau in 2009 and evaluates the current status of accommodation of the Gagauz’ interests in the country. Aspects of state-building and the influence of external actors are explored as well. Gagauzia (Gagauz Yeri) is one of the first post-Soviet autonomies. Since its establishment in 1994, no violent conflict has taken place there. However, the Gagauz language and culture remain relatively unprotected, and incentives as well as support for the integration of the Gagauz are low. The article outlines the potential for future disputes between the central government and local authorities, due to continuous attempts to limit Gagauzia’s self-governance and conflicting interpretations of how the autonomy should work. Furthermore, struggles between Gagauz political leaders and other local realities hamper the successful realization of Gagauz Yeri. With respect to Moldova’s efforts to resolve the Transnistrian conflict and to integrate with the European Union, compromises and cooperation through an ongoing dialogue between the centre and autonomy are clearly due. Resolving the remaining stumbling blocks could make Gagauzia a living, rather than symbolic autonomy.

Teachers’ perception of the concept of intercultural competence in teaching English

Intercultural competence (IC) as an essential part of conceptualization of the cultural dimension in FLT has been promoted by educationalists as the most preferred type of competence. One of the challenges of incorporating IC into FLT is to move from the recognition of IC as a model of teaching (Byram, Nichols and Stevens, 2001) to the development of practical applications. This can be due to the fact that teachers do not have sufficient knowledge of the theory behind the concept and consequently, have difficulties to implement the curriculum requirements with regards to IC into their teaching. The purpose of this study was to investigate how teachers of English in upper secondary schools in Sweden interpret the concept of IC and, accordingly, what is their view of culture in English language teaching. In order to answer the research question, I used an exploratory investigation by adopting a qualitative research method in form of semi-structured interviews. The results are similar to the previous studies (Lundgren, 2002; Larzén, 2005) and suggest that teachers lack theoretical background and central guidance with regards to IC and do not always integrate language and culture into an intercultural model of the English language pedagogy.

Academic journal publishing: Desiderata for the digital age

The consumption of academic journals has radically changed over the past decade, explains the author. While there has been an exponential rise in published scholarship, spiralling costs for commercial journals have caused cutbacks in subscriptions to academic journals by institutional libraries and raised calls for free online access to unpublished work that scholars have produced. The rise of the Internet has facilitated a concomitant growth in online scholarship. What, asks the author, are the promises on online scholarship?