Bending conventions: agency and self-portrayals in Japanese translator commentary

Abstract: The recent surge of interest in the figure of the translator has brought translator-authored writing into the spotlight in Translation Studies. Investigations into translator commentaries (in-book paratexts such as prefaces and afterwords) have generally mined them for data about translation history and procedures. Yet translator commentary also offers a potential space where translators can stake positions as cultural agents through first-person writing. This article investigates how translators present themselves in such texts, using Japanese literary translators as an example. It takes a random sample of Japanese translator commentaries from books in various literary genres, establishes their textual conventions, and then performs close readings of five commentaries to explore how translators write themselves into their text. The translators show themselves to be concerned with how their writing is received. Some use devices such as pastiches and anecdotes to entertain and inform readers, asserting their voice as writers. Others frame their identity as members of literary communities or socially conscious individuals. In so doing, they project identities as cultural agents. Consequently, this study argues that translator commentary should be re-examined in translation studies as a potential site of subjective expression and positioning in the literary field.     

双重股权架构的域外经验与中国应对

双重股权架构在美国已经有数十年的实践历史,近年来,亚洲各个冀望迅速推动本地高新企业成长的法域纷纷改变其既往立场,吸纳同股不同权公司上市。2018年,中国香港和新加坡率先在本地区实现了这种规则转变,而中国新设立的科创板也已经允许上市公司采用双重股权架构。中国引进双重股权结构应当谨慎行事,如需引进可以以中国香港规则作为基础...     

Anatomy of agency capture: An organizational typology for diagnosing and remedying capture

Recent crises and disasters in regulated industries have renewed scholarly attention to regulatory capture. The present research incorporates and builds on these efforts by creating a typology to help researchers and practitioners organize the capture literature. The typology has two dimensions: the degree of coordination within the regulated industry, the agents of capture; and the scope of capture within the agency and elected officials, the targets of capture. I illustrate the utility of the typology by using a case study of banking regulation before the 2008 global financial crisis. The case study uses process‐tracing methodology to weigh evidence about the role and scope of capture in creating the crisis. The contributions of this research are twofold. First, for capture theory, the typology assists in organizing the disparate, multidisciplinary research on capture mechanisms and remedies. Second, for practice, this organization can lead to more accurate diagnoses about the scope of capture and suggest appropriately tailored remedies.     

Sustaining Life: Rethinking Modes of Agency in Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

This article discusses ambivalence in the meaning and attribution of agency, and the role it plays in understanding vulnerability as a concept and condition that is specific to individual bodies. This involves examining agency as an embodied resource that vulnerability might draw upon when bodies endure conditions of uncertainty, detention and exile. The documenting of a partial narrative of an individual who set his body on fire provides an analytic lens through which to investigate the complexity and contextual specificities of vulnerability. The article argues that working with a single modality of agency resulting from a certain slippage between meanings of agency, political agency and resistance, might result in foreclosing alternative forms of living and sustaining lives. Agency is considered more expansively as a capacity for action that is necessarily mediated through situated capabilities, struggles and desires. The article argues for the need to analyse concepts held within a ‘grammar of vulnerability’ in order to discuss modalities of agency that capture both activities of resistance, but also other, often unseen, investments in sensory, affective and physical labours required for everyday activities in which individuals sustain their lives.     

Credible commitment without independent regulatory agent: Evidence from the Security Council's United Nations Compensation Commission

Credible commitment problems arise whenever decisions made according to short‐term incentives undermine long‐term policy goals. While political actors can credibly commit themselves to their long‐term policy goals by delegating decisions to independent regulatory agencies, the member states of international institutions rarely sacrifice control over regulatory decisions. Against the backdrop of the United Nations Compensation Commission established by the Security Council to settle claims on damage from the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, we present an institutional arrangement that promises to credibly commit member states to their previously defined interests without excluding them from the decision process. It separates the stages of rulemaking and rule application, and is reinforced by conditional agenda‐setting of an advisory body. We probe the theoretical claim with evidence from a unique data set that shows that the Commission settled compensation claims in a remarkably consistent way. The arrangement provides a blueprint for comparable regulatory tasks in many areas of international, European, or domestic politics, in which independent regulation is not feasible.     

浅析表见代理制度

表见代理是保证交易安全的一项重要制度。我国法律有关表见代理的规定十分有限,直接导致了表见代理案件在法律适用上的混乱。从代理权构成要件角度对表见代理进行分析,有助于明晰表见代理的概念、类别和法律后果,促使表见代理制度趋于完善。     

论我国代理法理念的重塑

1999年中国大陆新《合同法》第402条、403条的规定,大胆借鉴英美法系代理法的做法,突破《民法通则》将代理仅限于显名代理的陈腐规定,建立了隐名代理制度和不披露本人的代理制度。本文就此分析了我国代理理念从区别论到等同论的变化及其对我国当前的经济、民事活动即将发生的重大影响。     

Los caminos de la vida: acumulación,reproducción o superación de las desventajas sociales en México

This article develops an analytical model which, using a life-trajector y approach, attempts to identify and understand the articulation of social factors that favors reproduction, deepening or overcoming social disadvantages among youths. The analytical model analyzes longitudinal life-trajectories and places emphasis in their evolving character. The analytical reconstruction exercise stems from the systematization and analyses of 34 life-histories of Mexican youths who experienced harsh social deprivation during their childhood/adolescence. Testimonies were collected in three Mexican cities with diverse development levels: Oaxaca, Monterrey and Mexico City.     

When it pays to be a ‘fragile state’: Uganda’s use and abuse of a dubious concept

The labelling of certain states as ‘fragile states’ has often been portrayed as an act of domination by Western donors over the developing world. Nonetheless, this type of categorisation also presents opportunities to non-Western governments. This article suggests that the aid-dependent government of Uganda has increased its room for manoeuvre with donors by emphasising the degree of instability in the north of the country. By using this notion of state fragility, the Ugandan regime has successfully persuaded donors to continue their support, despite its domestic transgressions. The article will also attempt to explain the regime’s use of a contradictory, but equally persuasive, international discourse that presents Uganda as stable, strong and secure. In exploring how Kampala has successfully employed both narratives to carve out greater agency with donors, the article will emphasise the significance of donors’ physical detachment from the Ugandan ‘periphery’ in this dynamic.     

Les Contrebandières: Woman as Smuggler

The summer of 1999 marked the end of an era in Morocco. For the majority of the Moroccan people political power had rested in the hands of one man for their entire lives. That man was King Hassan II and he was now dead. While he was a monstrous tyrant in the eyes of some, for many he was to be deeply mourned as a man who represented a link in a royal chain that could be traced back to the prophet Muhammed and as such was the embodiment of the faith, the Commander of the Faithful. It was to be Hassan's task to bring Morocco into the modern world, and sultan became king. This arduous task, however, necessitated a blunt and brutal approach to crush tribal dissidence and proletarian insurrection. Nonetheless, as his son Muhammed VI was inaugurated, the legacy of Hassan's passion for a united kingdom was evident in the political landscape. Before his death Hassan had made some amends with the demons he himself had unleashed. Prisoners of conscience were being freed, oppositional voices were being heard and new democratic structures were slowly being put in place. In effect, the ground had been laid for his son to take the nation in new directions. One of these was an increased attention to the position of women in Moroccan society. As her brother was being prepared for his new position in life, Lalla Meryem, Hassan's eldest daughter, was receiving wide coverage in the press for any number of initiatives and pronouncements. That such a highly placed woman should speak out was not simply the timely intervention of a dutiful daughter. To those familiar with Morocco, names such as that of Fatima Mernissi and Zakya Daoud will already be familiar. Both these writers had been asking difficult questions about the position of women in Moroccan society for several decades. Films such as Jillali Ferhati's Reed Dolls (1981) and The Beach of Lost Children (1991) played a similar role in questioning the society's treatment of women. In fact Moroccan fiction, right at its inception, in Driss Chraibi's first work Le Passe´ simple (1956), had sought to understand the dynamics of patriarchal family life and the role of the mother, a theme that echoes in the writing of Tahar Ben Jelloun. More recently the independence struggle has been seen from the perspective of a woman in the fascinating account of the period given in Leila Abouzeid's semi-autobiographical novel Year of the Elephant , which was excerpted in this very journal, or her more recently translated memoir Return to Childhood . So Lalla Meryem's intervention was perhaps not so surprising. What was more surprising was the appearance, at the same time, of reviews of an avowedly feminist collection of essays in newspapers such as Le Matin du Sahara , a paper widely seen as the mouthpiece of the government. The book was a collection of articles edited by Aïcha Belarbi and entitled Initiatives fe´minine . It was published by the small Casablanca publishing house Editions Le Fennec and is the latest in a list of publications about Moroccan women that stretches back to Portraits de femmes , published in 1987. That such a publication can achieve such a review speaks as much for the potential for change in Moroccan society as the pronouncements of the new king. Women: a cultural review would like to introduce the collection to English-speaking readers by translating one of the chapters in the book. Chemseddoha Boraki's 'Les Contrebandières' takes up the intriguing economic theme of smuggling in northern Morocco. Through the use of memory, literature and observation it interrogates both the role of smuggling in a country such as Morocco and the part played by women in that particular trade. Its conclusion demands that the image and position of women within Moroccan society be profoundly rethought.