ABSTRACT. In 2019, Hong Kong witnessed the largest protests in its history (Lee et al., 2019). Protesters feared that a bill that allows extradition to mainland China would undermine Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy (Luqiu & Lu, 2021). Through their press coverage, British and US news organisations evoked public support for the mass movement (Ashcombe & Cheung, 2020; Myers & Mozur, 2019). The BBC and The New York Times (NYT) also disseminated protest stories in Chinese to inform Chinese readers of what was happening. Meanwhile, Chinese state-owned news media such as Xinhua News Agency (XNA) also narrated their versions of the protests, which, however, aroused mainland Chinese people’s antagonism toward protesters (Myers & Mozur, 2019).

This paper focuses on the escalating conflict of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, which occurred in November of that year, and examines how the conflict is framed by the BBC, NYT, and XNA. Specifically, it analyses translated Chinese news reports released by the three news organisations to identify the similarities and differences in their construction and translation of the narratives of the conflict. To fulfil this objective, I have developed an integrated approach that complements Baker’s (2006) narrative theory, which is developed for translation studies, with protest paradigm theory (McLeod & Hertog, 1999), which is used in communication and journalism studies. This approach offers a possible solution to the lack of explicit methodology in narrative theory (Baker, 2014) by using protest paradigm frames as key starting points for narrative analysis.

I have selected 68 translated Chinese news articles – 15 texts from the BBC, 16 from NYT, and 37 from XNA, all of which either focus on the issues of conflict and violence or evaluate these issues. I will present examples of narrative construction and translation and summarise the similarities and differences in the framing of the November conflict between the BBC, NYT, and XNA. This research project contributes to a more comprehensive analysis of the news translation research on social movements by exploring linguistic, social, cultural, and political factors affecting the news coverage of protests.

ABSTRACT. This study discusses the role of technological literacy of volunteer translators in the process of mitigating the forced displacement crisis. A report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicates that more than one million people fled home due to conflicts, violence, persecution, and human rights violations in 2022. Acting under Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that language shall not be a barrier to rights and freedoms, volunteer translators affiliated with Translators without Borders (TWB) respond to this phenomenon by supporting NGOs worldwide. They create communication channels to help forcibly displaced people obtain relevant information and access emergency resources tailored to their needs and situation. The research shows the importance of technological competency in the work of voluntary translators and the variety of technological tools they use. It also sheds light on volunteer translators’ needs in terms of accessibility of knowledge on mentioned tools. The author hypothesises that in order to provide accurate, relevant and timely translation in times of surging forced displacement, volunteer translators need to become fluent in the employment of tools that facilitate the translation process. The present study employs a qualitative and quantitative approach that involves a semi-structured questionnaire. Participants are volunteer translators who took part in projects conducted by TWB. In view of the current increased interest in the phenomenon of translation as a tool for crisis communication, this research can provide a valuable addition to knowledge in the field.

References O’Brien, S. (2022). Crisis Translation: A snapshot in time. INContext: Studies in Translation and Interculturalism, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.54754/incontext.v2i1.12 Response to the European Refugee Crisis. (2022, July 6). Translators Without Borders. https://translatorswithoutborders.org/european-refugee-response/ UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. (n.d.). UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/insights/explainers/100-million-forcibly-displaced.html Warsaw, U. (n.d.). Dokumenty, raporty. Www.Unic.Un.Org.Pl. https://www.unic.un.org.pl/dokumenty/deklaracja_en.php

ABSTRACT. The work of a sign language community interpreter is an extremely difficult job, requiring not only language and interpreting preparation, but also psychosocial skills, coping with stress and what has been experienced during work. During academic studies, the need for language preparation and acquiring the skills needed to present oneself well during conferences, political briefings and on television are emphasized. However, do the study programs for sign language interpreters at European universities prepare students to mediate in communication and enable it during crises: visits to a psychiatrist, psychologist or sexologist, police or court hearings, conversations with a pedagogue, helping people in the crisis of homelessness, warning messages about danger and other situations? In search of an answer to this question, programs of universities in the European Union and the European Free Trade Association countries will be reviewed in terms of e.g. learning the right lexicon, the presence of psychological preparation, learning social skills, learning how to deal with stress, kinds and places of practice. The poster will present a summary of the data obtained. Checking whether the profession of a sign language community interpreter is appreciated in the countries, duly including it in the training process. And whether it is perceived as interdisciplinary.

Author: graduate of BA Oriental studies, student of MA studies in the philology of Polish Sign Language, member of student research group Linguistic-Translative Group of Polish Sign Language "LiTr PJM". (University of Warsaw)

References: Bruin de, E. (2006). The psychotherapist and the sign language interpreter. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 11(3), 360-368. Kalata-Zawłocka, A. (2017). Społeczne i językowe konteksty tłumaczenia języka migowego w Polsce. Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Tryuk, M. (2006). Przekład ustny środowiskowy. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Tryuk, M. (2007). Przekład ustny konferencyjny. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Wit de, M. (2020). A Comprehensive Guide to Sign Language Interpreting in Europe, 2020 Edition. Baarn: M. de Wit.

Website links to each study program: www.mayadewit.nl/european-study.

ABSTRACT. Due to rapid population aging and major care personnel shortages, care for older people constitutes a significant challenge for many European countries and across the world. As a result, the increased demand for care services is often referred to as ‘old-age care crisis’ (Horn et al. 2021). Many countries have responded to this challenge by employing care workers from abroad. In the European Union, many of them are women from Eastern European countries employed as live-in caregivers in private households or as nurses and care assistants in institutional care settings. Given the fact that migrant caregivers make a substantial contribution to old-age care systems in the EU, there has been growing research interest in migrant care work. However, there is still relatively little linguistic research on the role of language in the context of care migration, in particular regarding the migration, care work and communication experiences of migrant caregivers working in private households. The present study aims to start filling this gap and explores migrant caregivers’ individual experiences and perspectives by focusing not only on the content of their narratives but also on how they recount their experiences and discursively construct their identities. The study is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrant workers from Ukraine who are employed as live-in care workers in Germany and Italy. The interviews have been conducted in Ukrainian, the participants’ L1, to enable the interviewees to recount their experiences more freely and in greater depth. By adopting a discourse analytic approach to narrative, the analysis of the interview data focuses on the recurrent topics and commonalities in care workers’ experiences and perspectives, as well as on the linguistic means they used to construct their identities and to position themselves and others in their stories.

References: Horn, V., Schweppe, C., Böcker, A., & Bruquetas-Callejo, M. (Eds.). (2021). The global old age care industry: Tapping into migrants for tackling the old age care crisis. Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. Due to the role of political leadership in the management of the COVID-19 crisis, citizens have begun to follow news on political figures more attentively. However, little attention has been paid to Internet users’ comments on associated reports although it has been demonstrated that such comments reflect public emotionality and may potentially shape readers’ evaluations of crisis management (Eisele et al., 2022). In this study, our aim has been to identify and analyse instances of humour so as to describe how it is (co-)constructed and what functions it fulfils in this context, also regarding the dimensions studied by Eisele and colleagues (2022). Our data choice followed from the fact that computer-mediated discourse about the pandemic is replete with jocular posts. The current data were collected from the Reddit and Wykop news aggregation services. Based on contextualization cues, such as the use of emoticons and lexical items, as well as other users’ reactions in meta-comments, we identified jocular posts and analysed them from the functionalist perspective (Schnurr & Plester, 2017). This revealed that they encompass, inter alia, wordplay, punning, and violation of causal reasoning. Regarding political figures, humour appears to be a means of ridiculing them, challenging their decisions, and questioning their private lives. In terms of the situation of crisis, jocular comments serve to create connectedness, to engender a pleasant atmosphere for getting knowledge, and to alleviate fear. In relation to future studies, a distinct advantage of analysing humour that surrounds news reports on political figures is that it may help crisis managers to evaluate public relations and to observe how public members cope with the threat, which can potentially be useful in designing tools for the protection of mental well-being in society.

References: Eisele, O., Litvyak, O., Brändle, V. K., Balluff, P., Fischeneder, A., Sotirakou, C., Syed Ali, P., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2022). An emotional rally: Exploring commenters’ responses to online news coverage of the COVID-19 crisis in Austria. Digital Journalism, 10(6), 952–975.

Schnurr, S., & Plester, B. (2017). Functionalist discourse analysis of humor. In S. Attardo (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and humor (pp. 309–321). Routledge.

ABSTRACT. Caregivers for relatives with dementia often experience ‘ambiguous loss’ (Boss 1999), that is, uncertainty concerning their loved ones’ psychological existence as certain types of people, which causes emotional distress and confuses kin relationships. Although well-documented in the professional literature (e.g., Boss et al. 2017; Dupuis 2002), the concept and its actualization in moment-by-moment interaction has not yet been adequately addressed. This paper examines how a sense of ambiguous loss with the concomitant relational ambiguity caused by a relative’s dementia is discursively constructed by family caregivers in a research interview.

Conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) have been applied to a 13-hour corpus of 10 audio-taped interviews with US-based female family caregivers to scrutinize their accounting practices. Considering an interview as a co-constructed social interaction and the local embeddedness of the produced data (Rapley 2001), the analysis illuminates the processual trajectory of ambiguous loss and its discursive encoding through an explicit or implicit use of ‘disjunctive category sets’ (Jayyusi 1984) such as (1) ‘stranger’ and ‘relative’, (2) ‘(mentally) absent’ and ‘(physically) present’ or (3) ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ in relation to a person with dementia. The configuration of the categories in these sets as exclusively (either/or) or inclusively (both/and) usable may point to caregivers’ (in)ability to tolerate ambiguity and integrate two polar categorizations of their loved ones. The analytical framework of MCA helps to qualitatively unpack situated meanings attributed by caregivers to loss situations which destabilize certain taken-for-granted expectations regarding their relationships with ill relatives and cause their emotional turmoil.

REFERENCES: Boss, P. (1999) Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press. Boss, P., Bryant, C. and J. Mancini (2017) “Ambiguous loss: A major stressor”, in: Family stress management. SAGE Publications, 71-84. Dupuis, S.L. (2002) “Understanding ambiguous loss in the context of dementia care: Adult children’s perspective”. Journal of Gerontological Social Work 37(2). 93-115. Jayyusi, L. (1984) Categorization and the moral order. London: Routledge. Rapley, T. (2001) “The artfulness of open-ended interviewing: some considerations on analysing interviews”. Qualitative Research 1(3): 303–23.

ABSTRACT. Recent research has revealed that bilingual speakers may differently process their native (L1) and non-native (L2) languages when being in a positive and a negative mood (see Naranowicz, 2022 for a review). However, little is known about how these mood states influence different levels of semantic processing (i.e., shallow vs. deep processing) in bilinguals’ respective languages. Here, we show that a negative compared to a positive mood may differently facilitate bilinguals’ behavioural responses resulting from shallow and deep semantic processing, as measured in a lexical decision task (LDT) and a semantic decision task (SDT), respectively. In two behavioural experiments, 70 Polish–English (L1–L2) proficient bilinguals were induced into positive and negative moods with affectively evocative animated films. In Experiment 1, 35 Polish–English bilinguals made lexical judgements on L1 and L2 sentences, ending either with a word (n = 360) or a non-word (n = 360). The analysis revealed that in the LDT, L1 sentences were responded to with greater accuracy in a negative compared to a positive mood, with no between-mood differences for L2 sentences. In Experiment 2, another group of 35 Polish–English bilinguals made semantic judgements on the L1 and L2 novel metaphoric (n = 120), literal (n = 120), and anomalous (n = 120) sentences. Unlike in Experiment 1, the analysis based on the SDT results showed differential findings regarding the L2, revealing faster response times in the negative than the positive mood condition, with no between-mood differences for L1 sentences. Altogether, the observed facilitatory effects of a negative compared to a positive mood in both experiments point to the activation of detail-oriented processing (see Forgas, 2018 for a review), which might be dependent on the language of operation as well as the level of semantic processing. Specifically, greater attention to details driven by a negative mood seemed to result in more accurate responses in L1 when performing a shallow semantic processing task (i.e., LDT), and in faster responses in L2 when performing a deep semantic processing task (i.e., SDT).

ABSTRACT. When confronted with a moral dilemma, people tend to be more likely to make a sacrifice to save more lives when the dilemma is presented in a foreign language, as opposed to a native language (Stankovic et al. 2022). To complement research on this phenomenon, the Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE), one (MA) study sought to find if the FLE may occur in participants immersed in a virtual reality, and the other, ongoing (PhD) study will seek to find cognitive and affective correlates of the MFLE in the context of factual moral dilemmas.

In the former study, 85 Polish-English bilinguals were faced with Switch Trolley and Cry Baby moral dilemmas (Christiansen et al. 2012), and asked to make a moral decision either in Polish or in English (two language conditions), and either in a virtual reality or after reading a text-based presentation (two modalities of presentation). The study failed to replicate the MFLE; however, it was found that participants facing dilemmas in the virtual reality endorsed utilitarian decisions more often and with greater certainty.

The ongoing PhD research project aims to find cognitive and physiological correlates of the MFLE in the context of text-based factual moral dilemmas, that is, ones devised to offer higher realism and participant engagement than trolley-type moral dilemmas used most predominantly in previous studies (Körner and Deutsch 2022). More specifically, the project seeks to find if late Polish(L1)-English(L2) bilinguals make different moral decisions when confronted with factual moral dilemmas presented in their L2 as opposed to their L1. Furthermore, since differences in moral decision-making have been frequently attributed to either reduced emotionality or increased cognition in L2, to account for potential language effects, EEG measures will serve to analyse whether L1 vs L2 cognitive and affective differences correlate with moral decision-making.