Miriam A. Locher

This introduction positions the themes of the collection within the field of pragmatics and translation studies. It outlines the breadth of the field from interpreting to sensory translation and discusses novel papers in four different parts. In the first three parts, translation is defined as involving at least two different languages, and the chapters focus on pragmatic processes and issues that surface in translation practices. The first part focuses on interpreting; the second part centers on the translation of fictional and non-fictional texts and spaces; the third part discusses audiovisual translation; and in the fourth part translation processes are explored in a wider context that includes translating senses and action into language in connection with experiencing and preparing food.

We compare fan subtitles and subtitles produced by professionals in order to detect what concepts each of them foreground, and how they differ in register and in translation strategy. Differences are systematically explored with the help of corpus-assisted discourse analysis to contrast two sets of English subtitles from 26 Korean dramas and 451 episodes – fan subtitles from Viki and professional subtitles from Netflix. Results reveal that professional translators show more target text orientation, whereas fan translators position themselves and their readers as expert members of their community, aiming for access to the source text. We find no clear difference in register, but professional subtitles are more concise, whereas Viki subtitles are longer and employ, e.g., hedges and disfluency markers.

This paper applies the theoretical concept of ‘acts of positioning’ (Davis & Harré 1990) to a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 474 status updates (SUs) taken from the Facebook Walls of twenty individuals living in Switzerland and the UK. Our aim is to analyze how individuals construct their identities through the use of language. The results show that individuals position themselves in five central ways, i.e., they stress aspects of their personality, pastime endeavors, sense of humor, work and relationship. Through a subsequent analysis of 228 reactions to status updates (RSUs), we also address how these acts are responded to, and thereby demonstrate that individuals predominantly support identity claims made in the SUs. Our paper contributes to existing research on language and identity in social network sites (SNSs), and demonstrates the fruitful application of the concept of ‘acts of positioning’.

This paper functions as the introduction to the special issue on ‘relational work in Facebook and discussion boards’. We position our research endeavors within interpersonal pragmatics (see Locher and Graham 2010), by reviewing literature on politeness, impoliteness and relational work in the context of computer-mediated communication. Foregrounding the relational aspect of language, we are particularly interested in establishing the connections between politeness, face and linguistic identity construction. We then position the four papers that form this special issue within this field of research. Two papers contribute to the study of relational work on discussion boards (Kleinke and Boes; Haugh, Chang and Kádár) and two deal with practices on Facebook (Theodoropoulou; Bolander and Locher).

This article investigates the pragmatic functions of complimenting and self-praise in two UK social media forums about smoking cessation, and responses to these speech acts. We compare these insights with other related e-health contexts (advice column, anti-smoking websites). Adopting an interpersonal pragmatics perspective, we focus on how these speech acts are employed for relationship creation. Our findings suggest that complimenting and self-praise are pivotal discourse practices in the forums. The status of the posting quitter – as new, or as successfully quitting – appears to affect the topic of compliments, the functions of third-party compliments and the order in which it is acceptable for initial posters to use self-praise; additional interpersonal effects relate to the overarching purpose of improving one’s lifestyle. In comparison to the peer-to-peer forum context, we find the number of compliments drastically reduced in the professional e-health contexts, which may be attributed to the set-up of practices. This paper adds to previous studies by exploring complimenting and self-praise in (e-health) social media.

Im/politeness research has been a solid and growing research field in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis during the last four decades. The scientific interest in this topic is not accidental and may be explained by the general pragmatic turn of modern interdisciplinary linguistic studies which are not focused on language as an abstract system, but on its functioning in various contexts and types of interaction. Knowledge of the strategies and politeness mechanisms used in various social and cultural contexts promotes mutual understanding in communication. In this introduction to the special issue on im/politeness in global contexts we will briefly position the topic of im/politeness research, and highlight advancements in im/politeness theory, method and data. We then turn to a brief synopsis of each individual paper and highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions and innovations proposed by our authors. We end with a discussion of the results and a brief outlook on future research.

This chapter functions as an introduction to the special issue on Language and Health Online, which features 10 original research papers. It reviews the results of the papers and the joint emerging themes: the impact of technical and social affordances of computer-mediated interaction; discovering an emic perspective of health issues, uncovering health ideologies, and the theme of patient empowerment; the construction of identities, the construction of shared experiences, and the use of narratives. The diverse methodologies that are employed are introduced and a case is made for an open, versatile and mixed methodology when researching language and health online.