Mimetic creativity in Japanese translations of Edgar Allen Poe

Abstract:

This study of contemporary Japanese translations of selected stories of Edgar Allen Poe argues that contemporary translators have adopted a creative strategy of translation that succeeds in avoiding what Berman has called ‘the destruction of underlying networks of signification’. In a writer of gothic horror such as Poe, chains of expression that establish a mood and visualization are vital to building the reader’s sense of fear and anticipation. The current study shows that the Japanese translators employ sound symbolism and alliteration to create a feeling akin to that in Poe, yet their application of such techniques is distributed differently than in Poe’s original language, and differently from one another. This article examines the use of mimetics in four contemporary Japanese translations of two of Poe’s gothic horror narratives and two translations of one detective narrative. The results show that the Japanese translators used mimetic words in their translations at rates similar to those found in recent studies of selected writers of modern and contemporary fiction. The second finding is that when translating the passages containing the seventy-six sound-symbolic forms in the English source text, the translators of Poe used Japanese mimetic terms 34 per cent of the time. The third finding is that the 34 per cent figure for percentage of sound-symbolic English words translated with mimetic expressions in the target text represented only 12 percent of the total number of mimetics (355 tokens) used in the Japanese translations. The fourth finding reveals an overlap in translator use of a mimetic averaging 42.6 per cent.     

Administrative innovation in municipal government

The purpose of this study is to identify those factors which account for administrative innovation in municipal government bureaucracies. Two dimensions of administrative innovation are examined: management and technology. Management innovation refers to procedures and methods by which policies are implemented. Technology innovation refers to the adoption of new physical products or processes. Multiple indicators of specific innovative practices are used to create a management scale and a technology scale and the two scales are then combined to create a composite administration innovation scale. In order to explain the dimensions of innovation the study employs a model comprised of three sets of independent variables: community variables, political system variables, and bureaucratic variables. Multiple regression analysis is used to examine the relationship between each set of independent variables and the dipensions of innovation. A second stage of analysis combines the three sets of explanatory variables into a single equation for each type of innovation. The results indicate that the three sets of variables are of significant power in explaining innovation, although as one moves from community variables to political variables to bureaucratic variables there is a decline in the amount of variation explained. Some variables are more important for certain types of innovation than for others, but population size, community growth rate, and electoral competition cut across the various types of innovation.     

Book Reviews

Throughout the twentieth century, the city of Khartoum was the subject of analyses and knowledge produced by diverse actors, such as scholars, urban planners, government agents and institutions, urban dwellers and, more recently, actors from the humanitarian and private sectors. The aim of this article is to offer a critical analysis of Sudan urban studies from the 1970s onwards, and to illustrate their strengths and shortcomings. A revisitation of the work of anthropologist Richard Lobban on Tuti Island, where I recently conducted ethnographic fieldwork, will allow me to comment on Marxist anthropology as the theoretical framework used by Sudanist scholars in the early decades of urban studies, to focus on methodological strategies for data collection, and to analyse the use of concepts such as “urbanisation” and “community”. These reflections will be used to suggest a research agenda for urban studies in Sudan, as well as recent academic approaches to the treatment of the urban question.     

Competitiveness concerns in Hong Kong: business fears and government incomprehension

Much of the analysis of the anti-globalization movement that has emerged in the last five years has focused on the degree to which the Internet has played a crucial role in contemporary social movements. It is commonly argued that the Internet helps create ‘virtual communities’ that use the medium to exchange information, coordinate activities, and build and extend political support. Much of the commentary on the web as a means of political mobilization for social movements stresses the degree to which the Internet compresses both space and time, accelerating the exchange of information among whomever has access to this technology. Equally important in this view is the deterritorialized nature of on-line protest and the diminution in importance of ‘place’ in current anti-globalization campaigns. Certainly this argument features prominently in analyses of the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1997-98 and the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle in November and December 1999. Our examination of the antiglobalization movement in Australia however leads us to a different conclusion: that while the Internet does indeed compress time, it compresses space in a different, and indeed quite variable, way. We examine the way in which Australians protested against the MAI and against the WTO meetings in Seattle, and show the differences in the nature of protest in each case. In the MAI case, the protests were well-organized and national in scope, with the Internet playing an important role in organizing the movement. By contrast, in the case of the WTO, the movement was minor and relatively marginal, with the Internet playing little discernible role in galvanizing protest. We conclude that crucial to an understanding of the differences was the considerable difference in the importance of ‘place’ in each case.     

Multilateralising regionalism: what role for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement?

Abstract

The Asia-Pacific region is home to a large and rapidly growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). These agreements differ widely in design, scope and purpose. The “noodle bowl” that has resulted runs the risk of distorting investment and trade. Neither global institutions (the WTO) nor regional institutions such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping have successfully addressed these issues. Amidst this increasingly messy situation, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement stands out for a range of important economic and political reasons, not least of which is its potential to take existing PTAs in the Asia-Pacific region in a new direction. The aim of the TPP negotiators is to produce a comprehensive, high quality, multi-party agreement to tame the tangle of PTAs and be a potential stepping stone to achieving the goal of liberalizing regional trade on a non-discriminatory basis. The economic gains from removing border barriers among the countries involved in the initial TPP negotiations are likely to be limited, however, given the small size of many of the economies and the existing PTAs among them. To date, the US has been unwilling to offer a single set of arrangements for all TPP partners, preferring to build on existing bilateral agreements. Pessimism about the immediate results from the TPP should be tempered, however, by considerations of the dynamics that it might set in train; on the other hand, it has the potential to divide the region and exacerbate China's concerns about “containment”.     

Learning from the news: Experiments in media,modality, and reporting about star wars

This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.     

Assessing civil society impact for democracy programmes: Using an advocacy scale in Indonesia and the Philippines

Democracy assistance programmes have always been notoriously difficult to measure in terms of outcome, but the need to show their impact (or lack of it) remains critical. This article represents part of a continuing endeavour to develop a tool for measuring civil society programme impact in the form of an advocacy scale encompassing democracy's critical components of participation, accountability and contestation. The scale is tested in the context of USAID-assisted initiatives in the Philippines and Indonesia, where it demonstrates a capacity both to monitor donor assistance outcomes and to suggest future programme initiatives.