Economy & Business: Slovakia’s Ungrateful Insight
Bratislava had good reasons for refusing to bail out Greece, but the decision also gets to the heart of what transition means.
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Bratislava had good reasons for refusing to bail out Greece, but the decision also gets to the heart of what transition means.
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Bulgarians revere those who tended the flames of culture and learning but can’t seem to do it themselves.
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Macedonian soldiers protest against low pay, bad equipment, and the lack of job prospects for veterans.
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The arcticle is concerned with issues related to Slovak migrants establishing at the outland labour market including their interest in permanent migration.
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In course-books designed for elementary learners of German (level A1.1) job titles are introduced starting with the first chapters. If titles as Lehrer, Verkäufer or Programmierer can be easily remembered and understood by the student, the relatively recent titles, created in the context of economic development and globalization, are problematic. The term Kaufmann and words derived from it exemplify the latter category. The aim of the present article is to analyze the diachronic evolution of the word "Kaufmann", i.e. dictionary definitions of the term and its correspondents in Romanian, in order emphasize the different meanings of the terms in the two languages. On the other hand, translating terms including the word Kaufmann represents a challenge for language teachers. This is why the paper offers a list of equivalent terms, which should not be perceived as exhaustive.
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The recently published book Metodologia cercetării ştiinţifice: elaborarea lucrărilor de licenţă, masterat, doctorat ("The Methodology of scientific research: writing graduation papers, Master’s dissertations and Ph.D. theses"), 2006, Bucharest, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, by Mihaela Şt. Rădulescu, elaborates a series of lectures delivered to undergraduates at the Translation – Interpretation Department of the Technical University of Civil Engineering of Bucharest, embodying the author's wide pedagogical experience and methodical study in the field. The book fills an important gap in the landscape of Romanian publications devoted to tertiary education, meeting the needs of wide categories of students and young researchers, faced with the challenging requirements imposed by the European academic environment.
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This paper is concerned with ways that we, as teachers, can develop our own practice through a continual process of reflection and investigation as part of our day to day teaching activity. It suggests that professional development, especially that aspect in which we are investigating our own teaching and learning, wrestles with the same, or very similar epistemological and ontological issues as research in this area. I will begin with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological issues related to classroom research, and I will then go on to examine the process of reflective practice. On the basis of this, I suggest a possible framework for our personal professional development through examining our own practices.
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This article is presented as a complement to previous articles focusing on English for the World of Work (EWoW) which were written from an applied linguistics perspective. This article looks at EWoW from the perspective of the reform of the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system which is currently underway in Romania.
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This article looks at Vijay K. Bhatia’s book, Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings, which had a powerful effect on genre research in the period following its publication, for significant researchers in the field, and which has retained its full relevance to ESP practitioners owing to the innovative ideas put forward by the author. It is therefore an attempt to prove how the concept or rather the instrument of genre, as defined and demonstrated by Bhatia, can be used with rewarding results in the teaching / learning of Business or Legal or Academic English.
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This article is an attempt to explore e-learning and management culture in search of analogies which could be used by English Language teachers for the purpose of strengthening the teacher's grasp over the students' learning process. If one accepts the analogical approach as a possible theoretical basis, one may come across findings regarding the student-computer interface that could be taken into consideration by the teachers themselves, to the extent teachers replicate such computer functions as resource providers or evaluators.
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The article analyzes the problem of errors against the background of recent foreign language acquisition theories. As we can notice in FLL, making mistakes accompanies foreign language acquisition: errors are a psychic phenomenon, but in FLL they are often due to insufficient work mechanisms of language production or voice recording. Research shows that the majority of all error has a universal character, i.e. mistakes are on the one hand independent of the learner’s mother tongue, on the other hand of the learning method, and finally they are to be found at certain levels of proficiency. Mistakes can help enhance the quality of the learning process, when their inventory is properly used for diagnostic purposes.
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Business English places much emphasis on the need to develop the skills for using the language learned, and consequently many courses focus on such areas as meetings, presentations, and negotiations. Organising and conducting class debates belong to the same area and my concern here is what attitude we should adopt and what methods should prevail in this type of activity as opposed to others. Just like meetings and negotiations, class debates involve a lot of talking and my question is how deeply we should become involved in a debate and consider ourselves part of it and to what extent we should just remain teachers. What is our position: a teacher, leader, facilitator, witness? Or should we embody all of them together?
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The aim of this article is to analyse the specific techniques used in the translation of advertising texts and the difficulty to render their message into the target language. The translator has to clearly identify the voices in the text, since this is an instance of polyphonic use of language. He has to rightfully transpose the persuasive use of the polyphony. Advertisements use literary devices; they can employ a voice which appears to be speaking personally to the reader.
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Recently translated into Romanian, The God of Small Things, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy's novel, has surprised readers with a story about love and loss, about boundaries and transgressions, about small things that suddenly become central events in the characters' destinies. The writer herself states in one interview that the novel is not concerned with the vast Indian themes, but that her main interest is the depiction of "insect life" which accidentally takes place in Ayemenem-Kerala, and could as well be happening in any other corner of the world. Roy writes a novel about the small detail in human existence, yet she cannot escape her cultural and social roots which eventually help shaping the plot of the book into a narrative regarding the big Indian issues. Roy makes use of a local scenario in order to elaborate a greater representation of the post-colonial Indian setting. Her novel can be considered a hybrid text since it is simultaneously contaminated by the two contexts, the Indian and the British.
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The present article starts from the premise that, generally speaking, political discourse relies on a set of invariable rules, and that political actors behave in the same way, regardless of their nationality or of their immediate purpose. The long-term goal of any politician is access to power; therefore, his / her behavior is always oriented along given lines. For the purpose of this paper, I have used the situation of a direct confrontation between two political actors; I start from the assumption that there are three main categories of strategies that politicians resort to: positive strategies (where the protagonist appeals to self-assertion), negative strategies (where they prefer to criticize the opponent(s)), and "neutral" strategies, which play on the emotions of the audience (potential electors). In the following pages, I shall focus mainly on the positive strategies. As an illustration of the theoretical background, I shall use extracts taken from two major electoral confrontations: the first Bush – Kerry presidential debate in the USA and the Nastase-Basescu debate in Romania, both taking place in 2004 with a view to winning the presidential elections.
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Men and women occupy separate cultural spheres as well as separate biological ones. Cultural differences between the sexes occur in all known societies and are made manifest in language, the shaper of human reality.
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Liviu Stan remains a leading figure of Romanian theology in general and of Orthodox canon law in particular. By presenting its contribution to the inter-Orthodox, inter-Christian and interreligious dialogue, we may conclude that Liviu Stan was concerned with the problems of the Orthodox Church, which emerged in inter-Orthodox or interfaith relations, expressing clearly and in an articulate manner his position and presenting relevant solutions that clarify the position of each party. His entire work focuses, one might say, on problems that have troubled Orthodoxy during his times, starting with the topics of the first pan-Orthodox conference in Rhodes. Through the views he expressed during the Pan-Orthodox meetings and elsewhere, Liviu Stan contributed to tighter relations between Churches and to the prestige of the Romanian Patriarchate.
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As one of the verbs from the great family of love, rasach underlines the aspect of finding pleasure in someone. It is a word used for describing Edom’s attitude for his returned brother or the missing actions of Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, for Israel. It also describes David’s love for the house of God and, in a more important way, rasach is used for the feelings of the Lord for Messiah or for Israel.
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In his Commentary of Plato’s Parmenides, Proclus analyses the state of the negations which express transcendence. The inferior negation refers to the being which is superior to non-being (as defect), the coordinated negation refers to the being which has the same rank as non-being and, finally, the type of negation superior to assertion expresses the type of Non-Being which is above being. Only if negation is under the influence of the Not-being superior to being, is it superior to affirmation. In the situation of the not-being which is on the same rank with the being, both negations and affirmations can be adequately applied to being. In the case of Non-being which is above being, neither the affirmations, nor the negations, properly apply. The negations of the One retain, on one hand, the meaning of the transcendence of the One with regard to all things, and, on the other hand, they give back to the One its role as the cause of all things – which were, in the first instance, negated of the One. Proclus establishes a relation of precise correspondence between the negations of the First Hypothesis and the affirmations of the Second Hypothesis, revealing that all those positive assertions proceed from these negations, and the cause of these is the One, as being prior to all other things. The negations do not embody a “lack” or a “privation” of the absolute One, but they actually hide the transcendence of the cause in regard to everything it generates.
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