Synergy

6

Authors: Radadiana CALCIU

As universities are facing a tough competition all over the world, the PR activity has become crucial in order to create an image, a personality to the organisation. Thus, they can inform the public about their outstanding achievements or their wide range of courses and as a result they would attract the best students and professors and would also raise funds to sustain their activities. This article describes the PR activity in German universities and gives some hints on how to improve the quality of materials used to enhance the image of the university, both in written or digital form.

7

Authors: Maria Liana LĂCĂTUŞ

Public choice economics is a new domain of knowledge developed in order to understand the complex mechanism of governmental intervention in economy and, especially, the lack of efficiency of governmental decisions and actions. Its founder is James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986. Public choice economics is focused on the effects of individual personal interest, voters and politicians alike, on public decisions. Public choice economics became a valuable teaching method which helps students understand and apply an economic way of thinking in the classroom or in real life situations.

8

Authors: Adriana CHIRIACESCU

Skilled business persons know that creating goodwill is the main objective of any business, whatever the specific objective may be: buying, selling or solving problems. How could we define good will? The Oxford Dictionary considers it as a “kindly feeling to persons”. Trying to define it, we may say that goodwill is the degree to which the receiver of the message perceives the communicator of the respective message as a likable, trustworthy and consistent person. Of course, this image shall be determined by the attitude of the communicator. Can goodwill be taught and learned? Our hope is that it can become a constant value of human behaviour by gradual, trained accumulation of knowledge and successful practice.

8

Authors: AESTHETS AND AESTHETICISM

This article does not intend to be a dogmatic critical approach. The two novelists that I focus on, Vladimir Nabokov and Mateiu L. Caragiale are observed from the perspective of their similarities and of their differences. Each author has a different cultural background and created his work in an environment that was in most respects different from the cultural milieu of the other. However, the artistic views of the two authors are more similar than one would imagine.

9

Authors: Doru ENACHE

The present article analyzes Emil Cioran’s well-known essay collection, On the Heights of Despair, explaining and illustrating the philosopher’s understanding of the absurd. The main ideas focus around the author’s approach to the meaning of life (or better said, to the meaninglessness of life), and around the efforts one makes in order to try to lend some noble purpose to one’s own existence. However, one’s only escape from the self-induced world of illusions seems to be the “passion for the absurd”.

10

Authors: Laura Mureşan

As language professionals, we are all familiar with the added value the European Language Portfolio (ELP) can bring to the language class and its potential for continuous language learning outside class. So which are the new vistas for the ELP? Which are its new roles and target audiences? Which is the transversal dimension of Portfolio-based self-assessment? These are some of the questions this article aims to address. The focus will not be on language teaching and learning per se, but rather on the relevance of language learning and the importance of communication and cooperation in a wider context of European values, integration and transferability of multiple competencies. To illustrate the role European projects can play in bridging the gap between the field of language education and the world of work, reference will be made to the Lingua 1 project “EuroIntegrELP – Equal Chances to European Integration through the use of the European Language Portfolio”, which has recently been awarded the European Label for Innovation in Language Education.

12

Authors: Monica CONDRUZ-BĂCESCU

This article explores the struggles of identity and the multiple processes associated with increasing globalisation in the modern age. The contradictory process of globalisation has led to wideranging changes in the processes of identity formation. Globalisation causes a loss of marks, of individual identity, far away from our own ego. In this context, the term “identity” makes reference to one’s feeling of belonging that allows an individual to identify him/herself with a social group through a sort of shared memory that has a single cultural ground. Identity is reflected in people's lifestyles, language and religion. It has two key aspects: similarity with others and difference. This fear of the loss of cultural diversity and hence identities stems from the fact that globalisation is viewed as cultural homogenisation or westernisation or Americanisation.

15

Authors: Anca PECICAN

The present research article is a cross-linguistic approach to economics discourse lexis, more exactly to the expression of business trends in Romanian and English. The analysis focuses on the use of conceptual metaphors in expressing increase and decrease of economic indicators such as price, GDP, unemployment, etc. and uses as corpus the Romanian and English Central Bank reports. Starting from Lakoff and Johnson’s definition and Deignan, Gabrys and Solska’s classification of conceptual metaphors, several types of such linguistic expressions are identified and compared. The findings of the research indicate that the metaphors used to express economic trends are largely the same between the two languages but differ in terms of frequency and lexical realisation. The study is intended to prove helpful to Romanian speaking economists reading and writing in English, as well as to translators and ESP students.