Contemporary political satirists:

Author(s): Jacob de Bruyn / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The conventional understanding of the church’s prophetic witness is that it is founded on the prophets portrayed in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. They communicated God’s message in relation to various issues such as religious practices and loyalty to God, but also, importantly, criticism and denunciation of political and social injustice. Satirical shows, in this study, refer to the satirical news components of TV late-night talk shows, as well as internet based satirical socio-political shows, where satirical commentary forms the common thread with prophetic witness, namely the indictment of political and social wrongdoing. Specific shows referred to in this study are The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Honest Government Ad, and Jonathan Pie. The angle of this paper differs from other studies in that it does not look at Christian/religious themes specifically, rather any issue warranting a prophetic voice, but which is often absent. The challenge addressed in this article is to see if a link between contemporary political satire and prophetic witness can be justified theologically. A cursory overview on satire in the book of Jonah as the most comprehensive representation of the genre within the prophets is done, as well as a discussion on possible prophetic themes and examples in a selection of political satire programmes. The study concludes that, while political satirists are not prophets, when interpreted in the context of God’s kingdom, they do at times speak prophetically.

Translating humour in children’s theatre for (unintended) diasporic audiences.

Author(s): Catalina Iliescu-Gheorghiu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

This article delves into children’s literature, more specifically, children’s theatre containing humour, and its double process of translation and/or adaptation, both “page to stage” and “stage to stage”, when a different language is involved, and the play is to be performed for an audience belonging to the target culture and an unintended diasporic one. The research perspective is descriptive (of the translational process) and comparative (of the source and target products). On the one hand, it analyses the cognitive and social mechanisms which create humour of different types (literary-stylistic, visual-auditive, and situational/of expectations) and those which allow the existence of ethnic humour. On the other hand, it tackles the translators’ decision-making process and the translation/adaptation strategies reflected by the final product. The material used for this research comprises the literary work in original, the script in the source language, the script in the target language, the recordings of the Romanian performance and the performance in Spanish by the Theatre “Anton Pann” (Romania). The author of this article coordinated the team of translators whose hybridity lies in their condition of first and second generation of Romanian residents in Spain. The results of this insight bring into light the debate on ethnic humour legitimacy and, at the same time, draw scholarly attention to the role played by translators in constructing and perpetuating images of cultures/literatures.

Subtitling Arabic humour into English:

Author(s): Hanan Al-Jabri,Ghadeer Alhasan,Sukayna Ali / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

This article examines how humour in Arabic stand-up comedies is translated into English in an audio-visual context. The study uses a case study of Arabic stand-up comedies streamed on Netflix, including Live from Beirut by Adel Karam and Comedians of the World/ Middle East. The shows which are subtitled into English involve a variety of Arab comedians speaking different dialects, including the Levant dialect (Lebanese, Jordanian, and Palestinian) and Gulf dialects, particularly the Saudi dialect. While several studies were conducted to examine the translation of English humour into Arabic, very few explore the translation of Arabic humour into English, especially in the realm of audio-visual translation. Arabic and English are two different languages reflecting different norms and cultures and, therefore, many linguistic and cultural challenges are expected to arise in the process of translation between them. The study draws on Pederson’s (2005) strategies for translating cultural references and Díaz-Pérez’s (2013) strategies for translating wordplay and puns. The study identifies two types of humour used in the Arabic stand-up comedies, namely language-restricted jokes (wordplay, puns, language variation, and taboo language) and culture-restricted jokes which require knowledge about the concept or character being referred to. Several translation strategies were used by Netflix subtitlers to render these types of jokes into English, including paraphrasing, generalizing, specification, substitution, and omission.

Преподавателски стратегии за стимулиране на активното учене и развиване на умението говорене на английски език в онлайн среда

Author(s): Polina Emanuilova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Beginning to speak a foreign language takes much longer than mastering the same skill in the native one. Among others, a possible factor for this is the lack of sufficient listening to foreign speech and of personally engaging conversation practice situations. This in turn could lead to a lack of confidence in pronunciation, difficulty in generating correct grammatical structures, and insufficient lexical diversity. The online environment gives the chance to compensate for the above deficiencies by ensuring practice of the linguistic aspects of speech, as well as a maximum number and types of situations to train speaking both inside and outside the classroom, whereas the instructor’s intervention aims at actively involving the learner in the learning process. Having formulated a definition of the concept of strategy, and by using the three modes of communication in foreign language teaching as a unifying framework – interpretative, presentational, and interpersonal (according to the ACTFL classification) – the article outlines some of the possible strategies an instructor could use to stimulate active learning and develop speaking skills in online English language training.

Book review

Author(s): Iveta Žákovská / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

Book review

Author(s): Loukia Kostopoulou / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

Book review

Author(s): Salomi Boukala / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

Неясните изрази в първобългарския надпис от Преслав

Author(s): Veselin Kandimirov / Language(s): English,Bulgarian,Old Bulgarian,Greek, Modern (1453-) Issue: 1/2023

The Preslav inscription (9th century) is one of the very rare texts in Proto-Bulgarian language written in Greek letters. Its first publisher – Venedikov, assigns it to the so-called “lists of armaments”, written in Greek stone inscriptions from the First Bulgarian Empire, which include varying numbers of armours and helmеts along with the persons responsible for them. The decipherment so far has revealed three types of armours and the names of two persons responsible for them (mentioned with their posts) in the inscription. The following phrases remain unclear: – ζητκω (as an adjective of ητζηργωυ βωυλε); – τωυρτωυναπηλε; – εστρογην / εστρυγην (as an adjective of κυπε); – χλωυβρην. In this article, they are deciphered through old Turkic, and the following translation is proposed: ζητκω corresponds to the old Turkic ‘sıtğa-‘ (‘to roll up sleeves’), but figuratively it means ‘preparing (to do something)’. The phrase τωυρτωυναπηλε is separated into words and is transcribed as follows: ‘turt una pilä’. ‘Turt’ is a causative in the old Turkic verb ‘tur’ – ‘to stand’, ‘to remain, stay, halt’, ‘is, exist’. Thus, ‘turt una’ means ‘required to be present here in this moment’. Pilä is the old Turkic ‘bilä’, or ‘with, together.’ On the basis of this translation, we can postulate that this inscription is not a list of arms but a mobilization list. It shows the number of soldiers who had to appear before the person who was to be their commander in case of mobilization – ‘ichirgü boyla’ (inner boyla). This list was kept in a place with a permanent garrison described as ‘turt una.’ The person carrying the title of ‘zupan’ was responsible for the staff of the garrison. Here, the separate types of weapons mean different types of troops. The term χλωυβρην should be understood as something belonging to the qualbur, or ‘mage, priest’. It remains unclear how the chainmail marked with εστρùγην/εστρυγην κυπε is to be translated. The first Danube Bulgarian word is most likely a loanword from an Indo-European language. -ην is a suffix, and the Indo-European root of the word should be ‘strog-‘ or ‘strig-‘.

Can the Foreigner Speak? Reflecting the World in the Romanian Novel 1844-1947

Author(s): Ovio Olaru / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The following article will attempt a partly quantitative analysis of the Romanian novel from 1844 to 1947, drawing on the archive of the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel. I will try to deliver an insight into how a South-East European literature, the Romanian one, has “reflected” the world – in several of its possible instances – over the span of little more than a century, thereby revealing its symbolic position in the European “world-system.” Its status will be indirectly quantified by looking at three different distances: to the West, to itself and its surrounding geographical setting, and to exotic, non-European geographies, by looking not at geography per se, but at representations of “the foreign,” i.e., of foreign nationals. These three perspectives are meant to pin the Romanian novelistic production on the map of European literature in conjunction to three fundamentally different and crucially influential cultural markers: the influence of the West as aspirational hub for the Romanian intelligentsia during the century of novelistic production, the manner in which the “interimperial” (in the sense given to this term by Manuela Boatcă and Anca Pârvulescu (Pârvulescu and Boatcă) drawing on Laura Doyle) position has determined different facets of self-representation, and lastly the depiction of exotic and foreign spaces and nationals, and how Romanian novelistic voices, otherwise self-deprecating in regard to the European core, adopted – to a certain degree – a European voice, Orientalizing the foreign.

Asynchronous Instantaneity. The Posthuman Turn in the Romanian Literary System

Author(s): Emanuel Lupașcu-Doboș / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Cultural globalisation, made possible by the enhancement of digital infrastructure, has led some scholars to reconsider the dynamics of core-periphery transfers, stressing the immediacy with which popular culture crosses national and linguistic borders. This is the case of Theory in the ‘Post’ Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, which in its preface proposes an epidemiological model of the transfer of cultural capital. In my paper, I want to relate “the contagion theory” to the import of Posthumanism in Eastern Europe and contemporary Romanian literature. The links between Posthumanism and contemporary literature have provoked sometimes productive, sometimes controversial local debates. The way in which this philosophy/theory is naturalised calls into question the instantaneity with which ideas circulate, since there are cases in which its core meanings are hijacked in Romanian culture. This cultural dysmorphia (along with other cultural products considered self-colonial) demonstrates how the unequal relations between centre and periphery are not completely dissolved by the digital turn but generate a new paradox of asymmetrical instantaneity. The aim of my article is to see how the theory of posthumanism travels from the centre of Anglo-American cultural studies to the semi-periphery of the Romanian literary field, where several mutations can be noticed: first of all, the shift from SF literature to poetry, which has a greater symbolic capital in Romania. I will analyse the contexts of the “regimes of relevance,” the transformations brought about by Romania’s accession to the European Union, and the mechanisms of diffusion of posthuman theory in the local space.

The Representation of the Tatars in the Polish and Romanian Historical Novel: A Case Study on Mihail Sadoveanu and Henryk Sienkiewicz

Author(s): Andreea Mîrț / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The article proposes an analysis of the representations of the Tatars in two historical novels published in Poland and Romania, respectively, from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. First of all, the article discusses the history of Sienkiewicz’s reception in the Romanian literary field and interrogates the possible interferences between two (semi)peripheral literatures (Romanian and Polish) as symptoms of the polysystem (Even-Zohar) of the Central and Eastern European literary field. Secondly, the case study on Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword and Mihail Sadoveanu’s Neamul Șoimăreștilor [The Șoimărești Clan] discusses the imaginary constructions articulated in the description of the Tatars ethnic minority. Using the “frontier Orientalism” concept (Andre Gingrich), the article shows how the representation of the Tatars has different roles, being a pretext for defining national identity and becoming a pretext for “the creation of transnational communities” (Terian). Therefore, the paper aims to identify the ideological stakes behind the representation of the Tatars, as well as to discuss the intersections between Sienkiewicz and Sadoveanu and their effect on the historical novel’s evolution.

Jewish Literature & World Literature. Unlearning (Trans)Nationalism

Author(s): Dragoș Bucur / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The present paper proposes an investigation of the concept of Jewish literature in its relation to world literature studies within an analysis of the first generation of Jewish writers who became part of the Romanian literary life following the 1923 emancipation. Born approximatively between 1890 and 1910, those authors do not form a homogenous group, representing different political orientations and relationships with their Jewish identity. One of the premises of the study is that, even if Jewish literature appears as a suitable corpus of text for world literature studies, considering its intrinsically transnational nature, it did not receive significant attention that would reflect this supposition, as researchers from both fields pointed out. Thus, studying the relationship between the two fields can inform one another and expose certain shared conflicts with the (trans)nationalist paradigm.

Dlužní úpis jako historiolingvistický pramen. Německý jazyk pražských kanceláří 16. století na příkladu vybrané písemné produkce České komory Ferdinanda I. Habsburského

Author(s): Václav Kříž / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2023

The article undertakes a historical-linguistic analysis of 27 documents written in German that are classified as “notes of hand” and issued by the Bohemian Chamber between 1528 and 1537. After a brief introduction to the history of historical-linguistic research into documents in German issued by the offices in Prague in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the article analyses the initial archive material from the perspective of (historical) text linguistics. Finally, it focuses on the difference between the text structure of one original draft and its register from 21 March 1530.

Mám doma kočku a mám ji rád! Ale jak ji pojmenovat? aneb o felionymech ve srovnávací perspektivě (na materiálu českého, slovenského a polského jazyka)

Author(s): Agnieszka Kołodziej / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2023

This article explores a phenomenon in zoonymy, i.e. the naming of animals. It studies the names of cats, the species which, alongside dogs, accounts for the majority of domestic animals in both cities and the countryside. What is more, cats do win much human affection. The analyses conducted are synchronous and comparative; the study focuses on research material from three West-Slavic languages, Czech, Slovak and Polish. The corpus of felionyms comprises 330 unique cat names, each language contributing 110 entries. All the names described refer to urban cats. The analytical part of the article is preceded by a number of observations focusing on terminology and the existing research on the subject. The classification of cat names comprises three categories: I. Indirectly motivated felionyms; II. Directly motivated felionyms; and III. Felionyms with multiple motivations. Categories I and II branch out into additional sub-categories. The most productive motivations for the cat names include: the colour of the fur on a part or the entirety of the cat’s body; size; corpulence; hairiness; pragmatic aspects; names and/or surnames of characters from television, films, literature and songs; and commemorative and birthday names. Among the least productive categories, one may enumerate temporal names; matro- and patronymic names; toponyms; and chrematonyms. The vast majority (almost 80%) of the names in the corpus can be treated as metaphoric transfers. The remaining cases can be considered word-forming derivations, mainly formed through the addition of a suffix.

Několik poznámek k eschatologii v Rozmlouvání člověka se Smrtí

Author(s): Bára Činčurová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2023

The article aims to shed more light on how the late medieval Czech dialogue Rozmlouvání člověka se Smrtí engages with eschatology. Firstly, it focuses on death; mainly that despite the dreadful descriptions of dying the poem maintains that death is a righteous, necessary pathway to an adequate afterlife. Attention is also paid to Trost’s remark that the personified Death embodies both, the first and the second death. Next, the paper focuses on the soul and the body in the dialogue, i. e. their painful separation and their reunion at the end of times. Lastly, the study touches upon afterlife, expanding Trost’s claim about death to concepts of personal and universal eschatology. While striving to capture the overlap of particular and final judgment or hell and second death, it stresses the importance of Death’s rejection of purgatory.

„Ej, duby, duby, zelené duby“. K mnemopoetice a symbolice (moravské) lidové písně

Author(s): Ondřej Skovajsa / Language(s): Czech Issue: 42/2023

The paper introduces the concept of mnemopoetics, i.e., how songs are composed to be remembered, how they are shaped by oral memory as only the songs worth remembering were preserved by the community. After a brief discussion of ‘memory of the body’ (cf. Saussy 2016), the author introduces the formal mnemopoetic features (role of incipit, genre, rhythm, dialogue, incremental repetition, strophic arrangement, etc.). In the second part, he focuses on the semantic mnemopoetic role of incipit parallelism, which announces what will happen next in the song-story (cf. Andersen 1985; Marčok 1980; Bartmiński 2016). He then analyzes the first part of Jan Poláček’s song-collection from Moravian Slovakia (Slovácké pěsničky, 1936) and distinguishes nine main groups of songs with the incipit parallelism variously announcing: 1. erotic desire, 2. courtship, 3. longing for marriage, 4. an obstacle in the way of love, 5. a sinister omen leading to a bad outcome, 6. disappointment, 7. parting, 8. death; and 9. joyousness. For example, the image of ‘running water’ in the first verse suggests an unhappy development in the love affair portrayed by the song. The study further verifies the validity of six most prominent identified announcements on the broader material of František Sušil’s (1860) classical collection of Moravian folksongs. As suggested by fieldwork introduced in the study, traditional singers from Moravia and western Slovakia are typically aware of the ‘second’ meaning in songs, and this awareness of song symbolism helps singers — and readers — not only to remember songs better, but to do them justice when interpreting them. More broadly, the study represents a contribution to the methodological analysis of symbolism in traditional song lyrics.

Století cest na Slovensko: na okraj jednoho česko-slovenského dialogu

Author(s): Jana Pátková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2023

This paper focuses on the literary representation of Slovakia in selected travelogues by Czech authors. The subject of the research is that of cultural stereotypes, images of the other, and constructions of us and them. The corpus of travelogues covers the period from the 1830s to the end of the 1930s. The methodological framework for analysing travelogues includes several diverse approaches. In addition to literaryhistory classification, the study employs an imagological approach while also taking into account an approach based on postcolonial theories in the context of the interpretation of cultural stereotypes. The material is divided into four historical periods with regard to the form and changing face of Czech-Slovak dialogue. Through the travelogue material under review we can analyse how the image of Slovakia within the Czech cultural myth of Slovakia has been shaped and transformed over the course of a century.

Číst, pochopit, interpretovat. Literární prozaický text ve výuce cizího jazyka a ve výuce literatury

Author(s): Andrea Králíková,Jana Marková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 42/2023

In this study, based on observations of our own pedagogical work, we consider different didactic approaches to the same literary text (the short story ‘From Prague to Brno’ by Jiří Kratochvil) in the teaching of Czech as a foreign language and in the teaching of literature, including analysis of literary texts. The starting point is a comparison of the learning objectives in both of these contexts, followed by a presentation of specific tasks and lines of inquiry vis-à-vis the text, their justification, and analysis of student reactions. In conclusion, we emphasize those aspects that should be considered in the teaching of literary and prose texts, not only by foreign language teachers but also (in our view) teachers of literature and literary interpretation.

Heteronymenreiche Denotate auf dialektaler Ebene mit geringem kommunikativem Verkehrswert

Author(s): Corinna Leschber / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2004

По повод книгата на Кр. Кабакчиев »Aspect in English. A Common Sense. View of the Interplay between Verbal and Nominal Referents«

Author(s): Stanisław Karolak / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2004