Inger Askehave

Digital Genres: A Challenge to Traditional Genre Theory

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non‐linear, multi‐modal, web‐mediated documents. It involves a two‐dimensional view on genres that allows one to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.Design/methodology/approach – The theoretical framework of the article is the Swalesian genre theory used in academic settings all over the world to investigate the relationship between discourse and social practice and to teach genre conventions to students of language and communication. Up till now most genre research has focused on the characteristics of “printed” texts, whereas less has been done to apply the genre theory to digital genres.Findings – The article discusses the characteristics of digital genres, notably the media constraints that have a significant effect on the production and reception of digital genres and suggests an extension of the Swalesian genre model that takes the digital characteristics into account.Resea...

If Language is a Game - These are the Rules: A Search into the Rhetoric of the Spiritual Self-Help Book If Life is a Game - These are the Rules

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the areas of metaphysics, spiritualism, psychotherapy and the like. New Age concepts such as ‘transcendence’, ‘self-realization’, ‘meditation’ and ‘holism’ (which in the 1960s were restricted to the hippies and their mind-expanding drugs) have now become fully accepted, widely acknowledged and, not least, used by people both inside and outside the New Age community. In the wake of this ‘popularization’ of New Age, a paradigmatic shift seems to take place in our society in general where traditional rationalistic thinking is replaced by, or at least fused with, a more irrational, emotional, and intuitive approach to argumentation. The aim of this article is to uncover the origins of this emotional and intuitive rhetoric. More specifically, I shall analyse the discourse of the spiritual self-help book and discuss the reflex of New Age ideology on language itself.

Translating for laymen

Abstract This article presents some of the final results of a Danish research project concerning the readability and user‐friendliness of patient package inserts translated from English into Danish. According to EU legislation, product information about medicine — the so‐called patient package insert – must be included with all pharmaceutical products in order to inform and protect consumers. However, sometimes, instead of informing consumers, patient package inserts confuse and perhaps even scare them. There are two major reasons for unsuccessful inserts. The first is the relation between the expert language used in the product summary (which is meant for pharmaceutical experts) and the non‐expert language required for the insert. The second factor is weaknesses in translations of inserts from English into Danish. In this article we will focus on the translation factors. Using examples of Danish patient package inserts translated from English we will discuss pitfalls in these translations, introducing the notion of competing skopoi in relation to the end‐users of the target text.

Communicating Leadership A Discourse Analytical Perspective on the Job Advertisement

This article explores the complex relationship between recruitment needs (whom to recruit) and recruitment communications (what message to communicate—and with what effect) in a Danish bank. It reports in part a large research project investigating a gender and career program launched by the human resource department in a Danish, medium-sized bank chain (referred to as “the Bank”). Using the Bank’s main written recruitment genre (the bank manager job ad) as a case in point, and including the results of two semistructured focus group interviews, this study reveals interesting insights into organizational recruitment tactics and provides an argument for the need to explore the relationship between recruitment needs, textual choices, gender, and career advancement.

Mandatory Genres: The case of European Public Assessment Report (EPAR) summaries

Abstract The aim of this article is to consider the nature of mandatory genres (legally regulated genres) emanating from European Union directives and point to the challenges that such genres pose due to their legal origin and complex text production and text reception processes. Taking its point of departure in one of the most recent mandatory genres within an EU medicinal assessment and approval context (the European Public Assessment Report [EPAR] summary) the article presents the results of an empirical study of 15 EU-approved, Danish EPAR summaries, testing whether the respondents believe the EPAR summaries live up to their declared purpose. The article concludes that the majority of the respondents do not think the EPAR summary fulfills its communicative purposes of providing information about The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Uses review and recommendation of the product and providing information that is understandable and useful to laypersons, respectively. The article points to some of the reasons why, in spite of careful preparation, and extensive guidelines prior to its ‘launch’ into the discourse community, the EPAR summary apparently fails to fulfill its communicative purposes.

The Internet for Teaching Translation

Abstract This article presents the Internet as a tool for translation. The article discusses the notion of translation‐relevant competence and demonstrates how Internet texts may be used to increase trainee translators’ genre and factual competences. Furthermore, the article introduces a method for working with Internet texts in translation training.

Medical Communication: Professional-Lay

Medical language has traditionally has been defined as a special language used in expert-to-expert communication within medical contexts. Recent years, however, have seen an increase in expert-to-layperson medical communication; not least brought forward by consumer campaigns for more openness and easy-to-understand layman information about illnesses, medication, etc. The need for medical information accessible to people outside the professional world has given rise to a new type of medical discourse, the professional-lay medical discourse. This article describes the shift within medical language. It sets out its present status, and lists the pitfalls and possible solutions to medical information for laypeople.

Thematising intercultural collaboration Discursive constructions of challenges and opportunities

Taking a critical discursive approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell and Potter, 1988, 1992) to analysing interview data, the article discusses the possible implications of top and middle managers’ constructions of intercultural collaboration for the day-to-day workings of a Danish–Ukrainian software company. Of particular interest is the extent to which divergent and contesting understandings may lead to positive synergies or conflict, and whether managers’ reflections may function as a means of justifying a particular mindset or course of action, provoking either contestation or acceptance within the organisation (e.g. Parker, 2000). Thus, the findings provide insight into the relation between discourse, that is, talk as (inter)action, and the development and enactment of organisational culture, contributing valuable and practice-oriented knowledge to the field of cross-cultural management. The data for the analysis are derived from 10 semi-structured interviews, which were conducted in the Danish headquarters and the Ukrainian division, respectively, securing a broad intraorganisational representation of voices.