Thesis (M.A. (Health Social Science))--Mahidol University.

This study investigated the relationship between reading attitudes in L1 and in L2 of learners in Pakistan. It also investigated the differences between reading attitudes of learners from different home backgrounds, rural and urban. The participants of the study had Sindhi as their L1 and English as their L2. They came from rural (n=186) and urban (n=202) parts of Sindh. The study employed a mixed methods approach. It collected data through a questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire collected information on four reading attitude variables: self perception as a reader, utilitarian value for reading, personal involvement for reading and lack of reading anxiety both in Sindhi and in English. The fifth variable was learner’s rural/urban home background. My study partially confirms findings from previous studies indicating that reading attitudes in L1 and in L2 are related. Rural learners displayed a stronger relationship between reading attitudes in L1 and in L2, whereas urban learners displayed a weaker relationship. This finding was further confirmed when, through a multiple regression analysis, the contribution of each reading attitude was checked in terms of the coefficient values. A learner’s ‘rural/urban home background’ emerged as the strongest indicator of a learner’s reading attitudes than his/her reading attitudes in Sindhi. Thus, urban home background seems to add positively to reading attitudes in English. The findings show the importance of one’s educational background, home and society on the whole in the process of developing a learner’s attitudes towards reading in English. Furthermore, this study also demonstrated marked differences in the reading attitudes of both the groups in terms of their reading attitudes in L1 and in L2. The rural learners had better reading attitudes in L1 than their counterparts, whereas the urban learners had better reading attitudes in English than the rural learners. Such a finding again supports the role of society and social background in shaping learners’ reading attitudes in L1 or in L2.

Doct. thesis Univ. of Manchester, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

La presente ricerca si colloca nel campo della traduzione audiovisiva, poiché riguarda il linguaggio filmico inglese. In particolare, lo studio si focalizzerà sul ruolo dei vocativi presenti in alcune opere cinematografiche. Il lavoro sarà dapprima eseguito sui dialoghi della versione originale e, successivamente, in quelli doppiati in italiano e in tedesco. I tre film che compongono il Corpus sono usciti negli anni ’90 e sono ambientati in epoca vittoriana: Jane Eyre, Swept from the Sea, The Piano. Le forme allocutive osservate sono soprattutto i nomi propri e gli appellativi generici. Attraverso la metodologia della Corpus Linguistics, si svolgerà un’analisi di tipo qualitativo e quantitativo. Infatti, tramite il software AntConc (Lawrence, 2004), si indagherà sul numero e sulla tipologia di occorrenze dei vocativi più frequenti nella lingua di partenza (inglese) e nelle due lingue d’arrivo (italiano e tedesco). Inoltre, si studierà l’eventuale manifestazione degli universali traduttivi (Baker, 1993), osservando contesto linguistico in cui il fenomeno si presenta. L’aspetto innovativo della ricerca consiste in una duplice analisi che coinvolge un triplice confronto. I risultati evidenzieranno una maggiore frequenza di vocativi nelle lingue doppiate e diverse classificazioni di occorrenze. Infine, saranno riportate alcune riflessioni inerenti alle strategie traduttive che sono adottate in italiano e tedesco, a seconda del contesto linguistico e culturale. / This research concerns the field of the audiovisual translation and the English movie language. In particular, the aim of the study will focus on the role of vocatives in a corpus of three films in three different languages. The chosen movies are produced in the '90s and are set in Victorian age: Jane Eyre, Swept from the Sea, The Piano. The empirical process will manly consider two categories of vocatives: proper names and address terms. The study approach will be based on the Corpus Linguistics methodology, in order to get a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the vocatives. Indeed, there will be an investigation on the number and the type of occurrences involving the most frequent vocatives, both in the source language (English), and in the two target languages (Italian and German). Another important task of the research is the observation of translation universals (Baker, 1993), and the linguistic context in which the phenomenon occurs. The innovative feature of this work is a twofold analysis, which involves a three-way comparison. The results will show a higher frequency of vocatives in the dubbed languages and also different classifications of occurrences. Eventually, there will be some consideration regarding the translation strategies adopted for Italian and German, depending on their linguistic and cultural context.

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