This volume offers a comprehensive examination of mitigation in speech in English and Spanish, exploring how it is defined and theorized and the various linguistic features employed to soften or downgrade the impact of a particular message across a range of settings. Building on the body of work done on mitigation in English, the book begins by discussing how it has been conceptualized in the literature, drawing on politeness theory among other perspectives from pragmatics, and highlighting increasing research on these topics in native and bilingual Spanish speakers and learners of Spanish. The volume explores examples from a variety of discursive contexts, including institutions, courts, and classrooms, to unpack mitigation as it occurs in spontaneous speech through different lenses, looking both at the actual units of discourse but also taking a broader view by examining differences across dialects as well. The book also looks at the ways in which conclusions drawn from this research might be applied pedagogically in language learning classrooms. This volume will serve as a jumping-off point for broader discussion in the field of mitigation and will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis, in addition to learners and pre-service teachers of Spanish.

After publishing "A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World" (Brill:2000), Rudolf de Jong completes his description of the Bedouin dialects of the Sinai Desert of Egypt by adding the present volume. To facilitate direct comparison of all Sinai dialects, the dialect descriptions in both volumes run parallel and are thus structured in the same manner. Quoting from his own extensive material and using a total of 95 criteria for comparison, De Jong applies the method of 'multi-dimensional scaling' and his own 'step-method' to arrive at a subdivision into eight (of which seven are 'Bedouin') typological groups in Sinai. An appendix with 68 maps and dialectrometrical plots completes the picture.

Non-Western Colonization, Orientalism, and the 'Comfort Women: The Collective Memory of Sexual Slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military examines the collective memory of sexual slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military in Japan over the past seventy-five years. Euphemistically known as the "comfort women," tens of thousands of young females were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War. The majority of these women are believed to have been deceitfully or forcibly taken from Korea, a former Japanese colony. The ways in which sexual slavery has been remembered in Japan lies at the root of a long-standing diplomatic conflict between Japan and South Korea and has fueled a "memory war" among Japanese scholars and activists. The author argues that Korean "comfort women" have been exoticized in the collective memory similarly to "Oriental" women's presentations by Western Orientalists. This book is a comprehensive analysis of the memory of sexual slavery in Japan, examining various artifacts produced since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, including nonfiction books, novels, newspaper articles, popular and documentary films, and a commemorative museum. It provides novel insights into a decade old international and domestic controversy.

This edited book contributes to the growing field of self-translation studies by exploring the diversity of roles the practice has in Spanish-speaking contexts of production on both sides of the Atlantic. Part I surveys the presence of self-translation in contemporary Indigenous literatures in Spanish America, with a focus on Mexico and the Mapuche poetry of Chile and Argentina. Part II proposes to incorporate self-translation into the history of Spanish-American literatures- including its relation with colonial multilingual-translation practices, the transfers it allowed between the French and Spanish-American avant-gardes, and the insertion it offered for exiled Republicans in Mexico. Part III develops new reflections on the Iberian realm: on the choice between self and allograph translation Basque writers must face, a new category in Xose Dasilva's typology, based on the Galician context, and the need to expand the analysis of directionality in Catalan self-translations. This book brings together contributions from some of the leading international experts in translation and self-translation, and it will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Spanish Literature, Spanish American and Latin American Literature, and Amerindian Literatures.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies is the authoritative reference for anyone with an academic or professional interest in interpreting. Drawing on the expertise of an international team of specialist contributors, this single-volume reference presents the state of the art in interpreting studies in a much more fine-grained matrix of entries than has ever been seen before. For the first time all key issues and concepts in interpreting studies are brought together and covered systematically and in a structured and accessible format. With all entries alphabetically arranged, extensively cross-referenced and including suggestions for further reading, this text combines clarity with scholarly accuracy and depth, defining and discussing key terms in context to ensure maximum understanding and ease of use. Practical and unique, this Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies presents a genuinely comprehensive overview of the fast growing and increasingly diverse field of interpreting studies.

We are witnessing the collapse of democracies in many parts of the world and a general tendency to the resurgence of right-wing and left-wing populisms led by authoritarian leaders. This book centres on the political dialogue in one of these democracies. The focus is on Venezuela, the rich Latin American oil producing country, and its transformation from a stable democracy to a very unstable and controversial revolution in which the dialogue has been occupied by only one party for 18 years. The central characters of the book are Hugo Chavez, who remained in power for 14 years as the main speaker and controller, and the people who either followed or opposed him in Venezuela and other countries. Contrary to critical analyses which are mainly based on social representations that conceive dialogue as implicit or normative, this book proposes a dialogue-centred approach, which articulates linguistics, conversation analysis, socio-pragmatics and political science from a critical perspective, and offers the theoretical foundations and procedures for analysing micro dialogues between specific persons and the macro social dialogue, which unveils the processes of domination and resistance to power. The book will be useful for scholars and students of linguistics, media, communication studies and political science wishing to learn more about dialogue in political interaction.

De-Sign in the Transmodern World integrates design and sign by revealing the mutual reciprocities between design and semiotics, and bridging the gap between humanities and sciences. By recognizing the global scope of semiotics and tolerating the uncertainty associated with design, human beings can go beyond absoluteness and become able to envision a desirable reality in the transmodern world. This publication examines the fusion of design and semiotics, which is at the core of evolutionary love that encourages us to go beyond what we conventionally perceive into what we are imaginatively capable of interpreting. As semiotic animals, we are capable of developing awareness, relationships, and mediation toward semiosis of an undivided wholeness in flowing movement. Human beings have unlimited "semioethical" responsibility toward each other and toward other-than-human systems. This ethical implication depends on our ability to liberate ourselves from the fallacy of absolute reality.

In a small village on the southern coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him a history of his journey which took him from Prague as far as to the Libyan sea. It is a voyage to uncover mysterious deaths of two brothers: one was murdered during the ballet performance, the body of the second one was found by Turkish fishermen at the Asia Minor shores. On the move, the amateur detective is accompanied by one of the brothers girlfriend. They have to work out a lot of traces, clues and rebuses - seemingly meaningless clusters of letters in the picture of a Hungarian painter, fragments of words created in the sea by bodies of phosphorescing worms, puzzling shapes of jelly sweets found in a small shop in Croatia or the plot of an American sci-fi thriller movie, which the protagonists watch in the cinema in Rome suburb. Such leads send the heroes from town to town, the plot takes part on night trains and many places in Europe - in Bratislava, Budapest, Lublan, on the islands of Mykon and Crete... With the search for the murderer of both the brothers many other stories are interconnected, and they take the readers to even more distant places of the Earth: Moscow, Boston, Mexico City...

Translation Studies has been in action in the Polish humanities since 1930s. The book gathers the most important contributions from Polish translation scholars working in the context of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Linguistics. The essays offer insights into the conceptualisation of translation, stylistics and poetics, history and anthropology of translation. Most of them are made available in English for the first time. The editors' introduction provides a panoramic backdrop for concepts, methodologies and applications. As part of the tendency to enlarge Translation Studies and include new contexts into its mainstream, this reader gives an overview of a rich area of translation scholarship from the centre of Europe, a crossroads of influences and traditions.

This comprehensive account of performance-based assessment of L2 lexical proficiency analyzes and compares two of the primary methods of evaluation used in the field and unpacks the ways in which they tap into different dimensions of one model of lexical competence and proficiency. This book builds on the latest research on performance-based assessment, which has most recently pointed to the application of more quantitative measures to L2 data, to systematically explore the qualitative method of using human raters in assessment exercises and the quantitative method of using automatic computation of statistical measures of lexis and phraseology. Supported by an up-to-date review of the existing literature, both approaches' unique features are highlighted but also compared to one another to provide a holistic overview of performance-based assessment as it stands today at both the theoretical and empirical level. These findings are exemplified in a concluding chapter, which summarizes results from an empirical study looking at a range of lexical and phraseological features and human raters' scores of over 150 essays written by both L2 learners of English and native speakers. Taken together, the volume challenges existing tendencies within the field which attempt to use one method to validate one another by demonstrating their capacity to indicate very different elements of lexical proficiency, thereby offering a means by which to better conceptualize performance-based assessment of L2 vocabulary in the future. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working in second language acquisition and applied linguistics research, particularly those interested in issues around assessment, vocabulary acquisition, and language proficiency.

This title was first published in 2001. Looking at German-American relations between 1776 and 1835, this study argues that it was day-to-day commercial contacts, rather than official diplomatic ties that forged the way in establishing good relations between the two countries. Although concerned with trade, this work is not strictly one of economic history, but instead looks at how wider economic trends impacted upon the socio-cultural and political connections.

Monteleone compiled this collection of words and phrases used by the "gangster, tramp or hobo" over the course of a career that spanned the 1920's, 30's and 40's. Both instructive and amusing, it contains hundreds of entries relating to criminal matters of the time, such as "Academy" (a Jail), "Across the River" (dead), "Grease the Track" (to fall under a moving train), "Looseners" (prunes), "Sprinkle the Flowers" (to distribute the bribes), "Sue Bowel" (A Chinese opium den), "Write short Stories" (to forge checks) and "Zib" (an easy victim). Also includes a table of hobo code symbols. A fascinating addition to any criminal law history library or collection, this book will likely be perused often.

A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish is a comprehensive, cohesive and clear guide to the forms and structures of Spanish as it is written and spoken today in Spain and Latin-America. It includes clear descriptions of all the main grammatical phenomena of Spanish, and their use, illustrated by numerous examples of contemporary Spanish, both Peninsular and Latin-American, formal and informal. Fully revised and updated, the sixth edition is even more relevant to students and teachers of Spanish. Practising Spanish Grammar is the ideal companion to the sixth edition of the widely acclaimed A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish. Thoroughly updated, this fourth edition of the workbook features an improved organization which closely mirrors that of A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, sixth edition. The selection of exercises has been fullyrevised and expanded with new exercises on a variety of topics includingpossessives, conditional, future and past tenses, and polite requests. The combination of reference grammar and workbook is invaluable for learners at level B2-C2 of the Common European Framework for Languages, and Intermediate High-Advanced High on the ACTFL proficiency scales.

This completely updated edition of A Frequency Dictionary of German contains the 5,000 most commonly used words of German today, occurring in a 20-million-word corpus (compared to a 4.2-million-word corpus in the first edition). The basis of the frequency list is a significantly extended version of the Herder/BYU Corpus of Contemporary German. The Dictionary contains spoken and written German, and represents different genres, text types, registers, styles, and also regional varieties. The Dictionary provides a rich resource for language teaching and curriculum design, while a separate CD version provides the full text in a tab-delimited format ideally suited for use by corpus and computational linguists. The corpus is designed to represent the current German language as it is used in the real world. Useful as a reference for students and course designers alike, A Frequency Dictionary of German is an important new resource.