• Asian review of World Histories
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.81-104
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• 2014

The popular uprisings that took place in the Arab world, and led to the overthrow of four heads of states, namely Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (January 14, 2011) of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak (February 11, 2011) of Egypt, Muammar al-Gaddafi (August 23, 2011) of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh (November 23, 2011) of Yemen, have attracted the attention of the world media and policy makers in the West and the Middle East, and triggered their concern for the political future of the region. This article does not offer a comprehensive assessment of these uprisings, but rather analyzes the coverage of Time and Newsweek of the underlying causes of the uprisings and their anticipated consequences. It also investigates how the two magazines have highlighted the scenarios that may pose a real challenge to Arab regimes supported by the American administration, and internationally reshape the priorities of American foreign policy in the region. These issues are examined from the two magazines' perspectives, which under line the features of U.S. foreign policy in the region, where the White House is more concerned about the security of the state of Israel, control of the Arab oil and suppression of "Muslim fundamentalism."

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.871-905
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• 2010

This paper is motivated by Watanabe's (2001) observation that English byphrase passives are sometimes translated into Japanese object topicalization constructions. That is, the original English sentence in the passive may be translated into the active voice with the logical object topicalized. A number of scholars, including Chomsky (1981) and Baker (1992), have remarked that languages have various ways to avoid focusing on the logical subject. The aim of the present study is to examine the translation equivalents of the English by-phrase passives in an English-Korean parallel corpus compiled by the author. A small sample of articles from Newsweek magazine and its published Korean translation reveals that there are indeed many ways to translate English by-phrase passives, including object topicalization (12.5%). Among the 64 translated sentences analyzed and classified, 12 (18.8%) examples were problematic in terms of agent defocusing, which is the primary function of passives. Of these 12 instances, five cases were identified where an alternative translation would be more suitable. The results suggest that the functional characteristics of English by-phrase passives should be highlighted in translator training as well as language teaching.