Search

This article examines how healthcare professionals use encouragement. Focusing on GAMBARU ["to try hard"], forty-one scenes were collected from healthcare manga. Each scene of encouragement was analyzed from three perspectives; the contextual background of the communication, the relationship with the patients and the patients' response to the encouragement, and the evaluation of the imposition of face-threatening acts, social distance, and relative power (Politeness Theory). Further analysis was conducted using Leech's (2009) Grand Strategy of Politeness, and each chosen communication event was categorized among ten types of speech acts. The findings suggest some implications to enhance the quality of healthcare communication that offers patients encouragement. (Contains 1 table.)

When translating culturally-colored discourse, a great deal of effort is required to overcome the complexities of and problems caused by the uniqueness of the source text. In this study, rakugo, which is the traditional Japanese performance art of telling comic stories, will be a source text for analysis. The culturally-specific features and the factors causing complications in the translation process will be explored, based on some excerpts from "Himaraya no hokutoshichisei: Septentrion over the Himalaya", the original rakugo script written by Sanyutei Kyoraku. According to linguistic relativity, differences in perspectives on reality often manifest themselves as specific features in language use in speech communities, and these differences seem to cause complications in translation because some words are specific to a particular language and cannot be translated literally. Translating the culturallycolored script, therefore, may necessitate the in-depth examination or exploration of given cultures or worldviews. As a more specific method for analyzing the translation process, the notion of high context vs. low context will be utilised. By examining the data with the notion of linguistic relativity in mind, the first and second person pronouns are highlighted as focal points. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to examine the frequency of first-person pronouns uttered or not uttered in Japanese where they are uttered in English, and the frequency of second-person pronouns uttered or not uttered in Japanese where they are uttered in English, and to investigate the ways in which these phenomena are related to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, such as in Hall's notion of highcontext and low-context societies. Furthermore, Japanese socioanthropological characteristics are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]