Synergy

2

Authors: Anca-Teodora ŞERBAN-OPRESCU

The incentives for putting together this volume lie behind several questions that Andreea Paul – the volume coordinator – asked herself and her readership in order to define the reasons and context for the writing and publication of this material: How much do men and women work? Where do they work? Salary/wages? What about their welfare? How do economists define gender discrimination? What is their impact on society? How does one characterize high fliers in Romanian culture and in the culture of the rest of Europe? What about Romanian entrepreneurship? What about Romanian women entrepreneurs? Which is the economic strength of Romanian women entrepreneurs? Who are these Romanian women entrepreneurs, exactly? How did they manage in a fierce business environment? Multiple initiatives for public support of female entrepreneurship – why?

6

Authors: YAN Zhimin

The present article is an introduction to the main difficulties of studying the Chinese language: Chinese pronunciation (including tones, consonants and vowels), as well as vocabulary. The article is structured into 3 parts: A brief introduction, the main part describing aspects of Chinese language learning to be taken into account by Romania students, and a conclusion. The second part of the article is divided into four sections (a, b, c and d) focusing on various aspects of Chinese phonetics. The article aims to help both Romanian students and teachers with their Chinese language classes. This article is also an incentive for Romanian students to learn more about China and Chinese culture starting from language.

8

Authors: Elena TĂLMĂCIAN

This paper focuses on both giving and receiving feedback on students’ five-minute economic presentations. The target students are first year undergraduates with the Faculty of Cybernetics and Faculty of Accounting within the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The first part of the paper consists in a wide range of the most frequent types of mistakes made by students while delivering their presentations on economic topics. The second part of our research contains students’ feedback on their own presentations being guided by a feedback leaflet. We find students’ feedback on their own presentations an important component which has deep motivations such as: establishing a connection between the topic they themselves have chosen to research and their future careers, trying to find starting points for further research, thinking about ways of making better presentations in the future.

9

Authors: Dana RADLER

For John McGahern’s second published novel in 1965, fear and memory work in a framework defined by personal identity and social functions. This article aims at looking at the novel employing the means of social and communicative memory theories, while linking them to the use of narrative means. The journey to the protagonist’s ego is an intricate journey with multi-layered connections and factors, and the incorporation of autobiographical elements resonates with the author’s generation, or recent ones. Although based on a theory widely adopted in literary studies, this approach remains open to further interpretations and links with potentially new trends and views, demonstrating the value of fiction far beyond classical literary criticism.

9

Authors: Virginia Mihaela DUMITRESCU

The present article takes a critical look at a few landmarks of translation studies focusing on aspects of literary translation, such as equivalence and reader-response, fidelity and freedom, the translator’s predicament of constantly having to keep the right balance between contradictory yet inseparable requirements (e.g. manner vs. matter, letter vs. spirit). Well aware of the vast, ever-expanding area of translation studies that will make any single writing on any subject of translation theory appear partial, limited, provisional or already dated, we have, from the very beginning, set ourselves the objective of examining just a few major themes of translation theory with the help of a minimum number of concepts and a subjective choice of authors spanning three centuries of intellectual debate in the AngloAmerican cultural environment (Alexander Fraser Tytler, Matthew Arnold and Eugene Nida), apart from passing references to other writers whose influential works we consider relevant to our topic. The article aims to emphasize the relevance of both new and old translation theory to present-day translation practice, and at the same time to point to various challenges posed by literary translation that may be helpful to future translators.

10

Authors: Raluca Nicoleta ŞERBAN

Although there is no overtly stated, direct influence between the two authors, Herman Melville and V. Voiculescu, the similarities that could be found at the level of their themes are indeed fascinating for an attentive reader: the regression of the human hero to the subhuman, animal regnum, or the opposite, the presence in their texts of anthropomorphic animals, the love/hatred relationship between the hero and the animal monster, or the theme of the quest. In this article, the first in a series that will explore these similarities, I only aimed to introduce the two authors’ writing, with a special focus on the reaction of literary criticism, both positive and negative, in both cases

11

Authors: Cornelia PĂTRU

In today's globalized, especially profit-oriented society the role played by economic factors is at least as important as the one of social aspects. Economic factors have an extremely important impact on the use of language for hidden and manipulative purposes. The use of euphemistic expressions in the language of advertising represents a specific way of influencing the public, which should help lead the customer's opinion to a certain direction. The present paper – based on the assembled corpus – aims to analyze one the hand, typical, repetitive patterns, on the other hand less frequent but expressive and linguistically remarkable evidences that proved to have research potential. Particular attention is paid to forms and functions of the discussed euphemistic elements.

16

Authors: Sharaf REHMAN

This short paper offers a brief history of the Hindi film industry located in Mumbai(previously known as Bombay) and the role the film music has played in the popularity and success of Hindi movies, locally and globally. The paper describes the effect of the Internet on the marketing of these movies and the film music that remains an integral part of the Indian cinematic phenomenon. The paper also highlights the importance of four essential elements in Hindi film music: the songwriter, the music director, the playback singer, and the choreographer.