An Analysis of Negative Verbs’ Equivalents in a Vietnamese Translation of ‘The Call of the Wild’

Negative verbs in English are regularly translated into Vietnamese as không (Doan, 2010). However, in different types of texts and specific contexts, especially in literary ones, the equivalents of negative verbs are quite diverse and distinctive. This study aims to analyze the Vietnamese equivalent diversity of negative verbs detached from the classic literary work – 'The Call of the Wild' by Jack London (1903) (ST) and the translation ‘Tiếng gọi của Hoang dã’ by Lam Hoai and Vo Quang (2019) (TT). Based on qualitative and text analysis method, after conducting a process of splitting, filtering, and inspecting source and target texts, 164 negative verbs were detached from the ST and their matching equivalents in the TT; không and its variants were identified as the dominant equivalent pattern (72.6%). Particularly, some specific equivalents, which were the results of passive-active restructuring (1.8%), negative-positive replacement (6.7%), and other structural, lexical transformations (12.8%), have been investigated for conceivably affecting features of equivalent selections by translators. The obtained results would be a modest part contributing to the vast work of building an English-Vietnamese corpus. The matter plausibly concerns translation issues, yet the outcomes of this study could be applied to translation training and teaching reading comprehension.

VERBAL REPRESENTATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR'S EMOTIONAL CONCEPT JOY

The article deals with the role the individual author's emotional concept JOY plays in the plot formation of the literary work. The aim of the paper is to determine how the representation of the joy concept reflects the key conflict in the novels "White Fang" and "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London and in the novels "Of Human Bondage" and "The Moon and Sixpence" by W. Somerset Maugham. In order to reach the aim, we use the following methods: conceptual, contextual, definitional analyses, and cognitive modeling method. The methodology for conducting the study involves 1) the identification of the conflict of the literary works reviewed; 2) the analysis of the primary, secondary and implicit representation of the JOY concept in these works; 3) the determination of what plot element and in what way is expressed in the language and what hidden information is given by the verbal representation of the joy concept. Thus, the research results manifest themselves in the detection of two similar oppositions: the North-South opposition is found in the novels by Jack London and the Genius-Philistine opposition is in the novels by W. Somerset Maugham. We come to the conclusion that the verbal representation of the JOY concept illustrates the similarities and differences between the categories "North", "Genius", "South", "Philistine" which are based on the characters` attitude towards the key elements of the conflict formation, which are freedom, love, religion, success, self-expression, new experience, welfare.

Epidemic as Metaphor: the Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature

"Epidemic as Metaphor: The Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature. Our paper searches for those common elements in selected literary representations of the plagues that have affected humanity. As a theoretical framework for our research, we have considered the contributions of Peta Michell, who equals pandemic with contagion and sees it as a metaphor; Susan Sontag views illness as a punishment or a sign, the subject of a metaphorization. Christa Jansohn sees the pest as a metaphor for an extreme form of collective calamity. For René Girard, the medical plague is a metaphor for the social plague, and Gilles Deleuze thinks that fabulation is a “health enterprise.” From the vast library of the pandemic, we have selected examples from Antiquity to the 19th century: Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jack London. For Camus, the plague is an allegory of evil, oppression and war. Our paper explores the lessons learned from these texts, irrespective of their degree of factuality or fictionality, pointing out how the plague is used metaphorically and allegorically to reveal a more profound truth about different societies and humanity. Keywords: epidemic, plague, The Decameron (Boccaccio), A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe), King Pest (Edgar Allan Poe), The Last Man (Mary Shelley), The Nature of Things (Lucretius), The Plague (Albert Camus), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London), The War of the Peloponnesians (Thucydides) "

A praga escarlate e o vírus da linguagem

: Este artigo discute A praga escarlate (The Scarlet Plague), novela publicada em 1912 pelo escritor estadunidense Jack London. A obra detalha um futuro alternativo em que o planeta foi devastado por uma pandemia e a população restante vive em condições próximas à barbárie. A obra é examinada em relação a teorias de contágio e é interpretada como uma instância exemplar das transformações intelectuais e políticas da chamada Era Progressista. Detalhamos como teorias da microbiologia e da epidemiologia influenciaram conceitos nascentes de multidão e cultura, particularmente em teorias nascentes de sociologia e comunicação. Argumentamos que a novela pode ser lida como uma reflexão sobre as atitudes e as ambivalências de uma classe de intelectuais reformistas da época, que buscava encontrar métodos e linguagens originais para representar a nova realidade social dos centros urbanos industrializados na passagem para o século XX.