Political discourse, media and translation

This volume addresses the role played by translation in international political communication and news reporting and brings to light the usually invisible link between politics, media, and translation. The contributors explore the interrelationship between media in the widest sense and translation, with a focus on politics texts, institutional contexts, and translation policies. These topics are explored from a Translation Studies perspective, thus bringing a new disciplinary view to the investigation of political discourse and the language of the media. The first part of the volume focuses on textual analysis, investigating transformations that occur in translation processes, and the second part examines institutional contexts and institutional policies and their effects on translation production and reception.

Social media and sentiment in bioenergy consultation

he push to widen participation in public consultation suggests social media as an additional mechanism through which to engage the public. Bioenergy companies need to build their capacity to communicate in these new media and to monitor the attitudes of the public and opposition organisations towards energy development projects. Design/methodology/approach This short paper outlines the planning issues bioenergy developments face and the main methods of communication used in the public consultation process in the UK. The potential role of social media in communication with stakeholders is identified. The capacity of sentiment analysis to mine opinions from social media is summarised, and illustrated using a sample of tweets containing the term ‘bioenergy’ Findings Social media have the potential to improve information flows between stakeholders and developers. Sentiment analysis is a viable Purpose The push to widen participation in public consultation suggests social media as an additional mechanism through which to engage the public. Bioenergy companies need to build their capacity to communicate in these new media and to monitor the attitudes of the public and opposition organisations towards energy development projects. Design/methodology/approach This short paper outlines the planning issues bioenergy developments face and the main methods of communication used in the public consultation process in the UK. The potential role of social media in communication with stakeholders is identified. The capacity of sentiment analysis to mine opinions from social media is summarised, and illustrated using a sample of tweets containing the term ‘bioenergy’ Findings Social media have the potential to improve information flows between stakeholders and developers. Sentiment analysis is a viable methodology, which bioenergy companies should be using to measure public opinion in the consultation process. Preliminary analysis shows promising results. Research limitations/implications Analysis is preliminary and based on a small dataset. It is intended only to illustrate the potential of sentiment analysis and not to draw general conclusions about the bioenergy sector. Originality/value Opinion mining, though established in marketing and political analysis, is not yet systematically applied as a planning consultation tool. This is a missed opportunity.

Resisting the final word:challenging stale media and policy representations of students’ performative technological encounters in university education

This article explores powerful, constraining representations of encounters between digital technologies and the bodies of students and teachers, using corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It discusses examples from a corpus of UK Higher Education (HE) policy documents, and considers how confronting such documents may strengthen arguments from educators against narrow representations of an automatically enhanced learning. Examples reveal that a promise of enhanced ‘student experience’ through information and communication technologies internalizes the ideological constructs of technology and policy makers, to reinforce a primary logic of exchange value. The identified dominant discursive patterns are closely linked to the Californian ideology. By exposing these texts, they provide a form of ‘linguistic resistance’ for educators to disrupt powerful processes that serve the interests of a neoliberal social imaginary. To mine this current crisis of education, the authors introduce productive links between a Networked Learning approach and a posthumanist perspective. The Networked Learning approach emphasises conscious choices between political alternatives, which in turn could help us reconsider ways we write about digital technologies in policy. Then, based on the works of Haraway, Hayles, and Wark, a posthumanist perspective places human digital learning encounters at the juncture of non-humans and politics. Connections between the Networked Learning approach and the posthumanist perspective are necessary in order to replace a discourse of (mis)representations with a more performative view towards the digital human body, which then becomes situated at the centre of teaching and learning. In practice, however, establishing these connections is much more complex than resorting to the typically straightforward common sense discourse encountered in the Critical Discourse Analysis, and this may yet limit practical applications of this research in policy making.

"Gene-fouled or gene-improved?" – Media framing of GM crops and food in Hungary

This paper presents results from a research which analyzed the reporting on genetically modified crops and food in the Hungarian tabloids and political papers with the highest circulation from 1 May 2007 to 31 October 2009. Both quantitative and qualitative media analysis was conducted. It was found that in contrast to some Western countries the issue had low salience in the investigated period; it featured especially marginally in the tabloids. Two distinct valenced frames could be differentiated: a dominant ANTI-GM (Threat) frame – which was particularly frequent compared to what has been found for some other countries, and a minority PRO-GM (Advancement and Benefits) frame. Despite a range of similarities with what had been reported by previous research from some other countries, argumentation on the GMO topic in the Hungarian press had several distinct characteristics, one of which was the relative prominence of economic arguments against the technology.

The Attributes of Social Media as a Strategic Marketing Communication Tool

New digital trends are transforming the media industry landscape, modifying elemental characteristics and attitudes of companies as well as of consumers. Firms often claim that their presence in social media (SM) is a key element to success. SM helps companies rethink the traditional one-way flow of their marketing messages and to incorporate a new interactive pattern into their communications. Nevertheless, these tendencies involve problems of strategic myopia for firms that do not structurally integrate these tools. One main problem is that institutions can rarely differentiate between the various types of SM and the attributes thereof, while the literature equally reveals a number of contradictions in the subject. The present conceptual paper lays the foundations of a strategic approach to SM and discusses its theoretical implications. Following an overview on the concept of SM, through a content analysis of the specialized management literature (n = 14), we present various best practices and reflect on the apparent lack of strategic thinking in using SM as a marketing application. Then, we compare these practical examples with general marketing strategy theory. By merging theory and practice, we aim to provide an insight towards a well-founded application of SM as a genuinely strategic marketing tool.

National, Regional, Global TV in Algeria : University students and television audience after the 2012 Algerian Media law

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the colleagues Saida Kheira Benammar, who helped to set up the survey in Mostaganem, and Mohamed Chihat, who helped to contact and meet researchers in Algiers, for their generous and wholehearted support. Viola Sarnelli also wishes to thank Prof. Bel Abbes Neddar, who sponsored and supervised her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Mostaganem, and his Magistere students, for their active participation in the Media and Cultural Studies seminars.

Financial media, globalisation, and China’s economic integration: comparing narrative construction of the Economist and Caijing

In June 2015, legal frameworks of the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank were signed by its 57 founding members. Proposed and initiated by China, this multilateral development bank is considered to be an Asian counterpart to break the monopoly of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2015, China’s Central Bank announced a benchmark interest rate cut to combat the economic slowdown. The easing policy coincides with the European Central Bank’s announcement of doubts over US Fed’s commitment to raise interest rates. Global stock markets responded positively to China’s move, with the exception of the indexes from Wall Street (Bland, 2015; Elliott, 2015). In the meantime, China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (or New Silk Road Economic Belt) became atopic of discourse in relation to its growing global economy, as China pledged $40 billion to trade and infrastructure projects (Bermingham, 2015). The foreign policy aims to reinforce the economic belt from western China through Central Asia towards Europe, as well as to construct maritime trading routes from coastal China through the South China Sea (Summers, 2015). In 2012, The Economist launched a new China section, to reveal the complexity of the‘meteoric rise’ of China. John Micklethwait, who was then the chief editor of the magazine, said that China’s emergence as a global power justified giving it a section of its own(Roush, 2012). In July 2015, Hu Shuli, the former chief editor of Caijing, announced the launch of a think tank and financial data service division called Caixin Insight Group, which encompasses the new Caixin China Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). Incooperation with with Markit Group, a principal global provider of PMI, the index soon became a widely cited economic indicator. One anecdote from November’s Caixin shows how much has changed: in a high-profile dialogue between Hu Shuli and Kevin Rudd, Hu insisted on asking questions in English; interestingly, the former Prime Minister of Australia insisted on replying in Chinese. These recent developments point to one thing: the economic ascent of China and its increasing influence on the power play between economics and politics in world markets. China has begun to take a more active role in rule making and enforcement under neoliberal frameworks. However, due to the country’s size and the scale of its economy in comparison to other countries, China’s version of globalisation has unique characteristics. The ‘Capitalist-socialist’ paradox is vital to China’s market-oriented transformation. In order to comprehend how such unique features are articulated and understood, there are several questions worth investigating in the realms of media and communication studies,such as how China’s neoliberal restructuring is portrayed and perceived by different types of interested parties, and how these portrayals are de-contextualised and re-contextualised in global or Anglo-American narratives. Therefore, based on a combination of the themes of globalisation, financial media and China’s economic integration, this thesis attempts to explore how financial media construct the narratives of China’s economic globalisation through the deployment of comparative and multi-disciplinary approaches. Two outstanding elite financial magazines, Britain’s The Economist, which has a global readership and influence, and Caijing, China’s leading financial magazine, are chosen as case studies to exemplify differing media discourses, representing, respectively, Anglo-American and Chinese socio-economic and political backgrounds, as well as their own journalistic cultures. This thesis tries to answer the questions of how and why China’s neoliberal restructuring is constructed from a globally-oriented perspective. The construction primarily involves people who are influential in business and policymaking. Hence, the analysis falls into the paradigm of elite-elite communication, which is an important but relatively less developed perspective in studying China and its globalisation. The comparing of characteristics of narrative construction are the result of the textual analysis of articles published over a ten-year period (mid-1998 to mid-2008). The corpus of samples come from the two media outlets’ coverage of three selected events:China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization, its outward direct investment, and the listing of stocks of Chinese companies in overseas exchanges, which are mutually exclusive in sample collection and collectively exhaustive in the inclusion of articles regarding China’s economic globalisation. The findings help to understand that, despite language, socio-economic and political differences, elite financial media with globally-oriented readerships share similar methods of and approaches to agenda setting, the evaluation of news prominence, the selection of frame, and the advocacy of deeply rooted neoliberal ideas. The comparison of their distinctive features reflects the different phases of building up the sense of identity in their readers as global elites, as well as the different economic interests that are aligned with the corresponding readerships. However, textual analysis is only relevant in terms of exploring how the narratives are constructed and the elements they include; textual analysis alone prevents us from seeing the obstacles and the constrains of the journalistic practices of construction. Therefore, this thesis provides a brief discussion of interviews with practitioners from the two media, in order to understand how similar or different narratives are manifested and perceived, how the concept of neoliberalism deviates from and is justified in the Chinese context, and how and for what purpose deviations arise from Western to Chinese contexts. The thesis also contributes to defining financial media in the domain of elite communication. The relevant and closely interlocking concepts of globalisation, elitism and neoliberalism are discussed, and are used as a theoretical bedrock in the analysis of texts and contexts. It is important to address the agenda-setting and ideological role of elite financial media, because of its narrative formula of infusing business facts with opinions,which is important in constructing the global elite identity as well as influencing neoliberal policy-making. On the other hand, ‘journalistic professionalism’ has been redefined, in that the elite identity is shared by the content producer, reader and the actors in the news stories emerging from the much-compressed news cycle. The professionalism of elite financial media requires a dual definition, that of being professional in the understanding of business facts and statistics, and that of being professional in the making sense of stories by deploying economic logic.

Medicated bodies: Mental distress, social media and affect

Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This paper analyses how a major new mental health social media site (www.elefriends.org.uk) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson's concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-experimentation (when people tailor their regimen by altering prescriptions or ceasing medication) and when dealing with a present bodily concern (showing how members have a direct, immediate relationship with the site). In addition, analysis illustrates how users face having to structure their communication to try to avoid 'triggering' distress in others. The paper concludes by pointing to the need to focus on the multiple emerging relationships between bodies and social media in mental health due to the ways the latter are becoming increasingly prominent technologies through which to experience the body when distressed.

No right to sext? A critical examination of media and legal debates about teenage girls' sexual agency in the digital age

Advances in digital photography and distribution technologies enable many people to produce and distribute images of their sex acts. When teenagers do this, the photos and videos they create can be legally classified as child pornography since the law makes no exception for youth who create sexually explicit images of themselves. The dominant discussions about teenage girls producing sexually explicit media (including sexting) are profoundly unproductive: (1) they blame teenage girls for creating private images that another person later maliciously distributed and (2) they fail to respect—or even discuss—teenagers’ rights to freedom of expression. Cell phones and the internet make producing and distributing images extremely easy, which provide widely accessible venues for both consensual sexual expression between partners and for sexual harassment. Dominant understandings view sexting as a troubling teenage trend created through the combination of camera phones and adolescent hormones and impulsivity, but this view often conflates consensual sexting between partners with the malicious distribution of a person’s private image as essentially equivalent behaviors. In this project, I ask: What is the role of assumptions about teen girls’ sexual agency in these problematic understandings of sexting that blame victims and deny teenagers’ rights? In contrast to the popular media panic about online predators and the familiar accusation that youth are wasting their leisure time by using digital media, some people champion the internet as a democratic space that offers young people the opportunity to explore identities and develop social and communication skills. Yet, when teen girls’ sexuality enters this conversation, all this debate and discussion narrows to a problematic consensus. The optimists about adolescents and technology fall silent, and the argument that media production is inherently empowering for girls does not seem to apply to a girl who produces a sexually explicit image of herself. Instead, feminist, popular, and legal commentaries assert that she is necessarily a victim: of a “sexualized” mass media, pressure from her male peers, digital technology, her brain structures or hormones, or her own low self-esteem and misplaced desire for attention. Why and how are teenage girls’ sexual choices produced as evidence of their failure or success in achieving Western liberal ideals of self-esteem, resistance, and agency? Since mass media and policy reactions to sexting have so far been overwhelmingly sexist and counter-productive, it is crucial to interrogate the concepts and assumptions that characterize mainstream understandings of sexting. I argue that the common sense that is co-produced by law and mass media underlies the problematic legal and policy responses to sexting. Analyzing a range of nonfiction texts including newspaper articles, talk shows, press releases, public service announcements, websites, legislative debates, and legal documents, I investigate gendered, racialized, age-based, and technologically determinist common sense assumptions about teenage girls’ sexual agency. I examine the consensus and continuities that exist between news, nonfiction mass media, policy, institutions, and law, and describe the limits of their debates. I find that this early 21st century post-feminist girl-power moment not only demands that girls live up to gendered sexual ideals but also insists that actively choosing to follow these norms is the only way to exercise sexual agency. This is the first study to date examining the relationship of conventional wisdom about digital media and teenage girls’ sexuality to both policy and mass media.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to Improve Prescription Appropriateness and Therapy Adherence in the Multi-morbid Elderly

Multimorbidity patients pose severe challenges to which information and communication technology (ICT) can help patients and doctors to answer with effective and efficient care.

Sexuality in the media and emotional well-being among lesbian, gay, & bisexual adolescents

LGB teens’ feelings, desires, and physical attractions run contrary to the heteronormative standards of American society. As such, LGB youth often experience feelings of sadness and dejection that can lead to depression and suicidal tendencies (Russell & Joyner, 2001). Evaluating the factors that could possibly influence the emotional well-being of LGB youth would be an important undertaking given the hindrances LGB adolescents face during sexual socialization. The purpose of this dissertation was to study the portrayal of sexuality in media popular with LGB adolescents and to assess the relationship between media exposure and emotional well-being among LGB teens. In particular, this dissertation distinguished between mainstream media and gay- and lesbian-oriented (GLO) media. GLO media were defined as any media outlet specifically designed, produced, and marketed for gay and lesbian audiences. Two studies were conducted to serve as the initial investigation in a program of research that will be designed to better understand the role of media in the lives of LGB individuals. The first study of this dissertation was a content analysis of the television programs, films, songs, and magazines most popular with LGB teens as determined by self-reports of media consumption in a survey of media use. A total of 96 media vehicles composed the content analysis sample, including 48 television programs, 22 films, 25 musical artists, and 6 magazines. Using a coding scheme that was adapted from previous media sex research, Study 1 measured the frequency of sexual instances as well as the type, nature, and source characteristics for each sexual instance. Results of the content analysis suggest that heterosexuality reigns supreme in mainstream media. When LGB sexuality is depicted in mainstream media, it is often sanitized. LGB sexual talk is rarely sexual; rather it is primarily about the social or cultural components of being lesbian, gay, or bisexual. LGB sexual behavior is also rare in mainstream media, which tend to depict LGB individuals as non-sexually as possible. LGB sexuality in mainstream media exists, but is more about proclaiming LGB identity than actually living it. GLO media depicted LGB sexuality more frequently than mainstream media did. GLO media often depict LGB sexuality in a more realistic manner. LGB sexual talk is about LGB identity, as well as the relational and sexual aspects of being a sexual minority. LGB sexual behavior is commonplace in GLO media, depicting LGB individuals as sexual beings. LGB sexuality in GLO media is prevalent and relatively authentic. The second study was a survey that assessed the relationship between media exposure (both mainstream media and GLO media) and LGB teens’ emotional well-being, considering self-discrepancy as an important mediating variable in that relationship. Study 2 also considered age, sex, and sexual identity commitment as possible moderating variables in the relationship between media exposure and emotional well-being. In Study 2, emotional well-being was defined as lower levels of dejection-related emotions. LGB adolescents (N = 573) completed a questionnaire that was used to investigate the relationships between media exposure and emotional well-being. Results of the survey indicated that mainstream media exposure was not significantly associated with dejection-related emotions. In contrast, GLO media exposure was negatively related to feelings of dejection even when controlling for age, sex, race, perceived social support, school climate, religiosity, geographical location, sexuality of peers, and motivation for viewing LGB inclusive media content. Neither age nor sex moderated the relationships between media exposure variables and dejection, but sexual identity commitment did act as a moderator in the relationship between GLO media exposure and dejection. The negative relationship between GLO media exposure and dejection was stronger for participants lower in sexual identity commitment than for participants higher in sexual identity commitment. In addition, the magnitude of discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal self mediated the relationship between GLO media exposure and dejection for LGB adolescents low in sexual identity commitment. However, self-discrepancy did not mediate the relationship between GLO media exposure and dejection for LGB teens highly committed to their sexual identities. Results of both the content analysis and the survey are discussed in terms of implications for theory and method. Practical implications of this dissertation’s findings are also discussed, as well as directions for future research.

Contemporary publics: shifting boundaries in new media, technology and culture

If the twentieth century has been dominated by discussions of the public, public life, and the public sphere, Contemporary Publics argues that, in the twenty-first century, we must complicate the singularity of that paradigm and start thinking of our world in terms of multiple, overlapping, and competing publics. In three distinct streams—art, media and technology, and the intimate life—this volume offers up the intellectual and political significance of thinking through the plurality of our publics. “Countering Neoliberal Publics: Screen and Space,” explores how different artistic practices articulate the challenges and desires of multiple publics. “Making and Shaping Publics: Discourse and Technology” showcases how media shape publics, and how new and emerging publics use these technologies to construct identities. “Commodifying Public Intimacies” examines what happens to the notion of the private when intimacies structure publics, move into public spaces, and develop value that can be exchanged and circulated.