The majority of existing controlled languages for English language technical documentation for industrial and consumer electronics are in-house, proprietary systems. As a result, limited information or research has been published and disseminated about them. This has created knowledge gaps that are addressed in this thesis. First, the thesis provides a detailed description of existing controlled languages with a stated aim to improve technical documentation comprehensibility and readability for native and non-native English users. This is achieved through obtaining information, much of which was previously unavailable or difficult to obtain, about their rule sets and lexicons. This fills a gap in knowledge about existing controlled languages. Second, the thesis analyses and synthesises the best-practice features of the text in modern, quality technical documentation that have been identified in government, academic and professional literature as contributing to comprehensibility (the cognitive use of the text to process and identify information) and readability (the physical use of the text to visually scan and recognise information). It then uses the identified linguistic, organisational and visual features of the text to analyse the rule sets from existing controlled languages. The main finding of the analysis is that the existing controlled languages fail to address the visual features of the text despite their prominence in the literature as contributing primarily to readability. The thesis seeks to address this failure to adopt a holistic approach to the improvement of technical documentation in existing controlled languages by developing a new, broader controlled language for consumer electronics with comprehensibility and readability-oriented rules that fully address the linguistic, organisational and visual features of the text. This is named COED (an acronym for Controlled English Documentation). Third, the thesis provides a detailed description of a study to evaluate the effect of applying the comprehensibility and readability-oriented rules from COED to extracts from existing technical documentation for consumer electronics. The findings clearly show that the application of the comprehensibility-oriented rules (that aim to make it easier to cognitively process and identify information) allows the native and non-native English users in the study to locate and understand information more accurately. With the additional application of the readability-oriented rules (that aim to make it easier to visually scan and recognise information), the native and non-native English users in the study are also able to locate and understand information more quickly. The study provides an encouraging demonstration of the potential of COED to improve both the accuracy and speed with which information in technical documentation for consumer electronics can be located and understood by native and non-native English users. It also fills a gap in research knowledge about controlled languages.

This thesis analyses the position of translations in the work of the American writer and translator Lydia Davis. Davis has been publishing stories and translations since the early 1970s, and has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust among others. This thesis argues that her translations form a graft onto the body of her own fiction; they are both part of her work and retain their identity as being written by someone else. The first chapter builds on theory from Translation Studies and literary criticism to formulate a theory of translation as a form of writing that creates texts which are recognised to be equivalent to another, pre-existing text in another language. The second chapter posits three main tendencies for how an author’s translations may be seen to interact with their other writings: no relationship; training or influence; and dialogue. The next four chapters provide case studies which analyse Davis’s translations in relation to other texts by Davis and the author she translated. Chapter three focuses on Blanchot, who is an important figure for Davis. Chapter four analyses Davis’s relationship of influence and dialogue with Leiris. Chapter five posits that Davis creates a dialogue with Proust in her translation and her novel. Chapter six questions Davis’s rejection of some of her translations as ‘work-for-hire’, focusing on Léon-Paul Fargue, whose writing is only superficially similar to Davis’s, and Danièle Sallenave, whom Davis rewrites in her own novel. The final two chapters analyse how Davis’s own stories use translation and similar intertextual techniques, questioning the boundaries of translation as a practice. These stories make translation a central part of Davis’s work, as it operates within the structure of some of her stories as well as in the more conventional sense of her translations of other writers.

There has been very little research on the effects of initial teacher education in English language teaching (ELT), especially in the context of short intensive pre-service courses. Even more scarce has been any published evaluation of material aimed at helping teachers in such contexts. This essay aims to begin to fill that gap by drawing on the author’s experience to describe and analyze the processes that led to the design and subsequent evaluation of materials aimed at such a learning context. In so doing, it develops and applies a methodology for post-use evaluation of materials and sets out opportunities for further research. The teacher education materials referred to are submitted with the essay, along with a published evaluation of one of those books, and other related publications. This essay contextualizes pre-publication evaluation procedures within the need to ensure that teacher education material is based on theoretically justifiable foundations. To that end, it briefly reviews trends in ELT teacher education and outlines the need for evidence based decisions on content before describing and commenting on pre-publication evaluation processes. The essay sets out the methodological decisions made when carrying out one published post-use evaluation before summarizing the findings and discussion of that study. It then sets out alternative post-use evaluation procedures and goes on to suggest principled criteria by which initial teacher education material can be effectively evaluated. The essay concludes by setting out two types of contribution to knowledge made by the total submission. One contribution is based on substantive findings from research. This includes the insight that early-career teachers value and benefit from discussing teaching with teachers of a similar status. Also, prospective teachers use teacher education material selectively and they value instruction in core competencies. In addition, it was found that the emotional aspects of socializing into the profession are often over-looked in initial teacher education. The second contribution to knowledge is procedural in nature. It seems axiomatic that, as part of a thorough quality control process, material should be evaluated after it has been used and this submission is based on a description, analysis and further development of a rigorous, post-use, public evaluation of teacher education material. As far as I know, this was the first systematic evaluation of teacher education material to be published that tried to gauge the impacts of specific material on users.

This thesis develops a deep ecocritical model of performance analysis. It examines historical and social structures. It asks if, in the light of climate change and ecological degradation, new ways of looking at our everyday performances in life and in art might provide clues about how we recalibrate our perspectives and practices in relation to the more-than-human world. It is concerned with critical analysis within non-theatrical and to lesser extent within theatrical performance contexts. It integrates study of representation, embodiment, landscape, materiality and metaphor to investigate relations and homologies [correspondences of position value, structure or function with shared roots] in performance relations between the human and the more-than-human spheres. It identifies developments within ecologically oriented performance practice and braids ecosophic positions to overcome methodological problems caused by dualist epistemologies. It argues that western metaphysics, hermeneutics and technological development contribute to positive feedback wherein we have become increasingly alienated from the more-than-human world. It charts progressive historical estrangement, objectification, enclosure, colonisation, de-materialisation and objectification of the more-than-human world. It does this to illuminate our anti-ecological and ecological performances in life, ‘culture’ and art.

With this thesis on the aftermath of 1968 in France, I have recreated the moment and environment of the libertarian paper Tout! Usually associated in historiography with the birth of the gay liberation movement in France, my initial research revealed its influence as more penetrative and revealing of the diverse left and new, countercultural movements of the early 1970s. I sought the testimony of former militants, writers and artists to uncover historical detail and motivations, and consulted relevant textual archives, aiming to situate and examine the paper within a number of interrelated contexts. Results showed the paper's historical touchstones of scurrilous Revolutionary papers and 19th/20th caricature typified by L’Assiette au Beurre. The parallel paths of Dada, surrealism and situationism, and the Marxisant legacy of the Russian Revolution, foreshadowed the blend of cultural and political in Tout! May „68 was the crucible of militant, festive currents and speech, a time of rupture and reorientation for the various activists later at Tout!, the paper Action and posters of the Beaux-Arts inspiring new forms of agit-prop. In the aftermath of 1968, mao-libertarian current Vive La Révolution converged with an ex-Trotskyist, faculty-based group seeking cultural revolution. Figureheads Roland Castro and Guy Hocquenghem oversaw the merger of these groups and outlooks, coinciding with the launch of Tout! as a „mass‟ paper. With a new look and „new political attitude‟, influenced by Italian radicals and the US underground, Tout! challenged all forms of authority in Pompidou‟s France, climaxing with the eruption of gay liberation in no.12. It was Tout!‟s role in promoting „autonomous‟ gender, sexual and youth movements that led to the disaggregation of Vive la Révolution, and despite successful sales the paper came to a sudden end in the summer of 1971. Like the rest of the far left, Vive La Révolution and Tout! suffered State repression, but evolved from a „proletarian‟ Marxist critique of capitalism to attack the life routine of work, school and the family, judging the political Right and the Parti Communiste Français as equally reactionary. The paper testified to the importance of international, indeed transnational activities of the far left in the early 1970s. It provided a formidable impulse for the gay liberation movement FHAR, and foreshadowed the first feminist paper Le Torchon Brûle. As such it was a crucial press conduit for American radical left forms and practices, spearheading a shift from gauchisme to the growing counterculture. Tout! exemplified a brief, intense and fast-changing moment in French subcultural history and set new trends in left political journalism for the 1970s.

1956 was punctuated by a series of events that shook the world, and is seen as having been not only a watershed for the international communist movement but also a turning point in the Cold War. This thesis is an in-depth study of a specific and under-researched aspect of French and Italian communism i.e. the responses of ordinary Communist Party members of what were the two largest and most important non-ruling Communist Parties to these historic events. Its aim has been to recover thoughts, feelings and responses of those 'on the ground' to these events via a series of personal interviews supported by national, regional and local archive evidence in a multiple case study.

Effective medical consultations make an important contribution to positive outcomes for patients. For the large number of international doctors working in English speaking countries, deficits in language and communication skills can be a barrier to this effectiveness. This reflective report evaluates the effectiveness of 'Good practice' (McCullagh and Wright, 2008), a course book and related components, in addressing those deficits. The book filled a gap in the English for Medical Purposes literature, by providing learning materials with a clear focus on communicating in the doctor patient interview. Existing tools for evaluation which these materials can make to improving doctors' skills and knowledge.

This thesis analyses French policies towards and perceptions of the British colony of Rhodesia, from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War up until the territory’s independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. Its main objective is to challenge notions of exceptionality associated with Franco-African relations, by investigating French engagement with a region outside of its traditional sphere of African influence. The first two chapters explore the development of Franco-Rhodesian relations in the eighteen years following the establishment of a French Consulate in Salisbury in 1947. Chapter One examines the foreign policy mind-set that underpinned French engagement with Rhodesia at this time, whilst Chapter Two addresses how this mind-set operated in practice. The remaining three chapters explore the evolution of France’s presence in this British colony in the fourteen and a half years following the white settlers’ Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Chapter Three sets out the particularities of the post-1965 context, in terms of France’s foreign policy agenda and the situation on the ground in Central Southern Anglophone Africa. Chapter Four analyses how the policies of state and non-state French actors were implemented in Rhodesia after 1965, and Chapter Five assesses the impact of these policies for France’s relations with Africa, Britain and the United States, as well as for the end of European rule in Rhodesia. This thesis argues that France’s African vision began to expand to include Anglophone Africa, not in the post colonial or post-Cold War eras, but immediately following the Second World War, thus challenging the view that France was solely concerned with its own African Empire at this time. Throughout, Rhodesia was intertwined with France’s policies towards Francophone Africa in terms of motivations, methods and men. This, in turn, had far reaching consequences for France’s presence on the African continent, its relationship with “les Anglo-Saxons” and the course of Rhodesian decolonisation.

On 28 October 1726 Gulliver’s Travels debuted on the literary scene as a political and philosophical satire meant to provoke and entertain an audience of relatively educated and wealthy British readers. Since then, Swift’s work has gradually evolved, assuming multiple forms and meanings while becoming accessible and attractive to an increasingly broad readership in and outside Britain. My study emphasises that reworkings, including re-editions, translations, abridgments, adaptations and illustrations, have played a primary role in this process. Its principal aim is to investigate how reworkings contributed to the popularity of Gulliver’s Travels by examining the dynamics and the stages through which they transformed its text and its original significance. Central to my research is the assumption that this transformation is largely the result of shifts of a translational nature and that, therefore, the analysis of reworkings and the understanding of their role can greatly benefit from the models of translation description devised in Descriptive Translation Studies. The reading of reworkings as entailing processes of translation shows how derivative creations operate collaboratively to ensure literary works’ continuous visibility and actively shape the literary polysystem. The study opens with an exploration of existing approaches to reworkings followed by an examination of the characteristics which exposed Gulliver’s Travels to continuous rethinking and reworking. Emphasis is put on how the work’s satirical significance gave rise to a complex early textual problem for which Gulliver’s Travels can be said to have debuted on the literary scene as a derivative production in the first place. The largest part of the study is devoted to textual analysis. This is carried out in two stages. First I concentrate on reworkings of Gulliver’s Travels published in eighteenth- and in nineteenth-century Italy. These illustrate how interlingual translation operated alongside criticism, abridgment, adaptation and pictorial representation to extend the accessibility of Swift’s work and eventually turned it into a popular and children’s book. Then, I examine British reworkings and how the translational processes which they entail contributed to the popularity and the popularisation of Gulliver’s Travels in eighteenth-century Britain.

The aim of this research is to examine the fisi practice and HIV/AIDS in a high HIV prevalence country and to highlight implications for HIV/AIDS policies and programmes. Five objectives were identified to meet this aim. First, it assesses the extent to which the Malawian elites (educated Malawians working on HIV/AIDS) are reframing the AIDS epidemic to further their goals and self interests. Second, it investigates whether the debates on HIV prevention in Malawi are facilitated or constrained by international donors (bi and multilateral agencies). Third, it explores whether or not HIV/AIDS is being represented as an exceptional circumstance, justifying policies that would not normally be applied to other public health crises, for example to other Sexually Transmitted Infections. Fourth, it ascertains and examines the extent to which international frameworks, agendas and paradigms are influencing and impacting on traditional cultural practices, resulting in changes to legislation to ban such practices. And finally, it assesses the implications of the findings for the conceptualisation and provision of current and future HIV/AIDS policies and programmes in Malawi. In-depth interviews (n=60) were carried out to foreground stakeholders’ own views and to understand how constructions of narratives linking HIV/AIDS and harmful cultural practices came about. These data are also supported with interview data (n=28) I collected during a consultancy for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, interviews I conducted in a village in Lunzu (n=45), newspaper articles, policy documents and field notes. Findings demonstrate that due to the epidemiology of HIV the fisi practice does not contribute significantly to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Malawi. Instead, I argue that the way that harmful cultural practices have been linked to the spread of HIV/AIDS is a distortion of the reality and what becomes lost is a critical understanding of how harmful cultural practices impact negatively on women’s lives and feed into patriarchal values.