‘These changes and accessions of knowledge’: translation, scientific travel writing and modernity - Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative

A second English translation of Alexander von Humboldt's account of travel to South America, the Relation historique (1814–25), was published between 1852 and 1853. Appearing some 30 years after the first seven-volume translation (1814–29) by Helen Maria Williams, this second rendering of the Personal Narrative by Thomasina Ross was an abridged version that aimed to make Humboldt's travelogue more relevant to the mid-century reader. This translation has largely been overlooked by Humboldt scholars, despite it being a far more affordable, accessible and popular edition. I discuss here how Ross's revisions can be understood within a larger process of rereading and revision that responded to critics’ assessments of the first translation. Emphasising the status of the Personal Narrative as a text in flux, I assess how Ross modernised it to meet the demands of a new readership, recasting the image that Humboldt had constructed of himself as a travelling scientist, scientific writer and member of the international scientific community.

The performance of football club managers: skill or luck?

This paper evaluates the extent to which the performance of English Premier League football club managers can be attributed to skill or luck when measured separately from the characteristics of the team. We first use a specification that models managerial skill as a fixed effect and we examine the relationship between the number of points earned in league matches and the club’s wage bill, transfer spending, and the extent to which they were hit by absent players through injuries, suspensions or unavailability. We next implement a bootstrapping approach to generate a simulated distribution of average points that could have taken place after the impact of the manager has been removed. The findings suggest that there are a considerable number of highly skilled managers but also several who perform below expectations. The paper proceeds to illustrate how the approach adopted could be used to determine the optimal time for a club to part company with its manager. We are able to identify in advance several managers who the analysis suggests could have been fired earlier and others whose sackings were hard to justify based on their performances.

Does managerial turnover affect football club share prices?

This paper analyses the 53 managerial sackings and resignations from 16 stock exchange listed English football clubs during the nine seasons between 2000/01 and 2008/09. The results demonstrate that, on average, a managerial sacking results in a post-announcement day market-adjusted share price rise of 0.3%, whilst a resignation leads to a drop in share price of 1% that continues for a trading month thereafter, cumulating in a negative abnormal return of over 8% from a trading day before the event. These findings are intuitive, and suggest that sacking a poorly performing manager may be welcomed by the markets as a possible route to better future match performance, while losing a capable manager through resignation, who typically progresses to a superior job, will result in a drop in a club’s share price. The paper also reveals that while the impact of managerial departures on stock price volatilities is less clear-cut, speculation in the newspapers is rife in the build-up to such an event.

Exploring writing in products in students with language impairments and autism spectrum disorders

Oral language skills scaffold written text production; students with oral language difficulties often experience writing problems. The current study examines the ways in which oral language problems experienced by students with language impairment (LI) and students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) impact on their production of written text. One hundred and fifty seven participants (Mage = 10;2) with LI or ASD completed standardized measures of oral language, transcription, working memory, and nonverbal ability and produced a written narrative text assessed for productivity, grammatical accuracy, and quality. Measures of transcription, productivity, and grammatical accuracy, but not text quality, were poorer for students with LI. Transcription skills accounted for the majority of variance in the writing of the LI cohort. For the ASD cohort, handwriting, oral language and autism symptomatology were significant predictors. When students with ASD also experienced language problems, their performance was equivalent to that observed in the LI cohort.

Foreign credit: travel writing and authenticity in the dutch translation of The memoirs and travels of Mauritius Augustus, Count de Benyowsky (1790)

This article explores the translation and reception of the Memoirs and Travels (1790) of Count Mauritius Augustus Benyowsky (1746-86) in the Netherlands, and examines the complications, tensions and problems that transfer between a major and a more minor European language involves. I analyse how the Dutch translator Petrus Loosjes Adriaanszoon positioned himself as a mediator between these very different source and target cultures and ask how he dealt with the problems of plausibility and ‘credit’ which had beleaguered the reception of the Memoirs and Travels from the outset. In this article I am concerned to restore minority languages to the discussion of how travel literature circulated in Western Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and to demonstrate how major/minor language translation was central to the construction of Dutch-language culture in the Low Countries in this period.

Writing in a non-standard Greek variety: Romanized Cypriot Greek in online chat

Cypriot Greek, a variety of Greek spoken in the island of Cyprus, is relatively distinct from Standard Greek in all linguistic domains. The regional variety does not have a standard, official orthography and it is rarely used for everyday written purposes. Following technological development and the emergence of Computer-mediated Communication, a Romanized version of written CG is now widely used in online text-based communication, among teenagers and young adults (Themistocleous, C. (2008), The use of Cypriot-Greek in synchronous computer-mediated communication (PhD thesis), University of Manchester). In this study, I present the innovative ways that Greek-Cypriots use Roman characters in an effort to represent features of their spoken language in their online writings. By analysing data obtained from channel #Cyprus of Internet Relay Chat, I demonstrate how the choice of writing in CG affects the ways that Roman characters are used. I argue that this practice is not just a response to technological constrains but it actually has a wider social significance.

A multidimensional comparison of discourse organization in English and Chinese university students' argumentative writing

Three methodological limitations in English-Chinese contrastive rhetoric research have been identified in previous research, namely: the failure to control for the quality of L1 data; an inference approach to interpreting the relationship between L1 and L2 writing; and a focus on national cultural factors in interpreting rhetorical differences. Addressing these limitations, the current study examined the presence or absence and placement of thesis statement and topic sentences in four sets of argumentative texts produced by three groups of university students. We found that Chinese students tended to favour a direct/deductive approach in their English and Chinese writing, while native English writers typically adopted an indirect/inductive approach. This study argues for a dynamic and ecological interpretation of rhetorical practices in different languages and cultures.