Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture

20-29

Authors: Christina Dokou

This paper aims to explore from a technofeminist standpoint this failure to enunciate a ‘feminine’ technoscientific praxis in the Puttermesser and Xanthippe episode of Cynthia Ozick’s 1997 ‘serial’ novel The Puttermesser Papers. In particular, there is a tragic failure to integrate procreative ethos and creative technoscience: when the latter is placed in the service of the former, the curse of Frankenstein rears its ugly head, and catastrophe ensues. The female scientist, a Jewish polymath like Ruth Puttermesser who creates a female golem to save New York, in releasing procreativity from the necessity of heterosexual reproduction, unwittingly unleashes a plague of ‘hyperfemininity’ that threatens to destroy culture. Thus, the break from the biological restraints of procreation and the establishment of a utopian femarche (female rule) are deconstructed, parodied, and retrospectively opposed as destructive, while the figure of the female savant / scientist emerges as a tragic one, torn between the need to nurture, and the catastrophic consequences of that need.

48-65

Authors: Laura Karpinska, Dace Liepiņa

The technological advances of the 20th and 21st centuries have played a significant part in facilitating information exchange and processing the worldwide community outreach. A significant achievement has been the development of electronic dictionaries and terminological databases that allow access to information from various sources and in different languages. Much has been done to develop Latvian electronic dictionaries in line with the requirements of modern lexicography; however, the available electronic terminological databases are not so helpful in dealing with domain-specific terminology as is the case of Legal Latvian and its equivalents in other languages. The aim of the present research study has been to examine Latvian-English-Latvian electronic lexicographic resources, their adaptability to user needs and reliability, focusing in particular on their treatment of legal terminology where utmost precision is required. The research reveals the need for a free-access legal terminology electronic database where Latvian terms have equivalents from different foreign languages with appropriate support information. Undoubtedly, such a database can be developed only in close cooperation between language specialists and legal professionals that would consolidate the stability and reliability of Latvian legal terminology and the respective equivalents in other languages.

86-100

Authors: Alla Martynyuk, Olga Dubtsova

The paper reveals and describes the causes of communicative failures from a perspective of the intersubjective approach to communication incorporating basic assumptions of psycholinguistics. It introduces a unit of communication analysis called an intersubjective act. It is defined as an inter-action, where verbal/non-verbal communicative actions of addressers are viewed as perceptual stimuli that, coming into the focus of addressees’ attention, trigger parallel conscious/non-conscious inference processes involving cognition, volition, and affect to issue a command of a communicative and/or (immediate or postponed) social action. Inferential analysis applied in the research provides tools for the recreation of communicants’ inferential processes and allows consideration of perceptual, cognitive, affective, and volitional aspects of interaction. Inferential analysis handles American cinema discourse represented by the genre of a situation comedy that models live communication, supplying instances of communicative failures to subject to analysis. А communicative failure is viewed as an inability on the part of an addressee to make an inference or make a faulty inference in an intersubjective act. Communicative failures are identified and classified in accordance with the element of the physical or mental experience of the participants of an intersubjective act, which plays a privileged role in causing them. We distinguish between perceptual, lingua-cognitive, cognitive and affective-volitional communicative failures.

114-135

Authors: Līga Romāne-Kalniņa

Presidential speeches as a type of political discourse are aimed not only at the negotiation and construction of the national identity of a nation-state at a local level but also at the representation and shaping of the national identity internationally. The presidents of the Baltic States have represented their individual, collective and regional identities in the international gatherings of world leaders since the restoration of independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the Soviet Union. The current study displays an analysis of how the keyness factor of particular lexical items used in 142 speeches given by the presidents of the Baltic States internationally from 1991 until 2021 helps to identify the tendencies of identity construction and representation, which can then be investigated in detail via a critical analysis of the discursive strategies and linguistic means applied in the speeches. Moreover, the analysis of keyword tendencies across speeches marked by different criteria shows how the process of identity construction as marked by lexical change varies across time and states. The keyness factor points to multiple identities being constructed in the international speeches, where the national identities are constructed most frequently, followed by the common European identity, Baltic regional identity, and global identity. It is also concluded that a common political past is one of the main elements of national and Baltic identities, while shared values such as democracy and cooperation are the main elements of supra-national identities.

152-173

Authors: Jānis Sīlis

The article is a study of relations between translation theory or, to be more precise – theoretical and applied translation studies and translation practice (i.e., regular work of translation professionals) with a glimpse into the views of some prominent translation theorists and afterwards provides a general picture of opinions of novice translators, experienced professional translators and translation studies experts in Latvia. The feeling is that in ‘real life’ there is a wide gap between the assessment of translation theory and practice in the eyes of several groups of persons relevant to the phenomenon of translation. A deeper survey and analysis of its results shows that the range of opinions is very wide among both translation theorists and practitioners. The pivotal question of this study is to find out who are of those who care (or do not care) about translation theory and who are those who care for translation theory. Is translatology as a research discipline a necessary complement to translation practice, or is it a testing site for ever more sophisticated translatological schools?