Academic literature on the topic 'Chinese Graphic novels'

<p>The article explores the demands that the conflictual dimension of globalization poses for a cosmopolitan education. Such an emphasis seems necessary in times where the populations who undertake inter- and intra-national border crossings are increasingly those who are forced to: those trying to escape unbearable poverty, atrocious wars, the disenfranchised and victims of racist, sexist or religious persecution. Reflecting on the experiences articulated in the two graphic novels, <em>Persepolis</em> and <em>American Born Chinese</em>, the dimension of the globalizing world and its impact and demands on its future world citizens which comes to the fore is one that highlights the necessity for learning how to take a critical and political stance rather than the search for how education can facilitate a smooth adaptation to a new mobile order. Stanley Cavell’s examination of the relationship between autobiography, philosophy, and the founding of a self-reliant voice will be reconsidered in light of its contribution to re-thinking the meaning of a cosmopolitan education between critical self-appropriation and developing a transformative political vision of a new societal order.</p>

Literary translation is tricky. Hardly ever do you hear a critic say that the translation of a book is “good”. In the best of cases, people pretend that, even though they have been reading a translation, they were in fact reading Balzac, or Dostoevsky, or any other author of universal renown. For those who are able to read the original text, the translation is more often than not rejected as “inaccurate”, “stylistically inadequate”, “loose”, “overly free”, “not doing justice to the original”, or simply “bad”. James Payn even claimed that Balzac “is not translatable, or when translated is not readable” (67). Yet Balzac was translated and retranslated many times in a variety of languages and in many ways. In this paper, the word retranslation will be used for the realisation of a new translation from the original source language into a target language in which a translation already exists, and relay translation for translations done from a translated source. As for the term translation, it will be extended, in the sense that Patrick O'Neill gives this term (6), to include adaptations such as movies, TV series, or even graphic novels, in any language, because adaptations, whatever the medium, are subjected to the same constraints as translations, creating effectively a new “language” to transfer the author’s story and message. Thus this paper will focus on how Balzac's novels have been extended when translated and/or adapted to other media, taking in consideration Roulet’s Discourse Analysis parameters (2001 44), that is, the hierarchical constraints related to the text structure; the linguistic constraints related to the syntactic or lexical norms of the language or linguistic variety that is being considered; and the situational constraints of the receiving culture. To do so, an analysis of the hierarchical constraints of translating, retranslating or adapting Balzac’s La Cousine Bette will be carried out, as well as of the linguistic constraints related to the translation of gender in Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, or to the translation of accents and other oral features in various novels; and finally of the situational constraints related to translating Balzac into English in the Victorian era, and into Chinese at the turn of the 20th century. From these parameters a new, prismatic view of Balzac’s creations will emerge, embodying the dialogue that translators and retranslators enable between cultures.

This article reports an empirical study which compared the effects of different writing tasks on the writing products of EFL students. This study recruited 50 students from two natural classes in a Chinese university. In the pre-test, they were given the same writing task with only textual instruction and no difference was found in their writing quality. In the test, one class was given graphic novel with textual information, while the other class was given the same graphic novel without textual information. It finds that the group given graphic novel performed better than the other group in terms of content richness, plot development, organization, and language accuracy. It concludes that graphic novel is a better way to scaffold EFL student’s narrative writing and visual information should be included in EFL literacy curricula.

In Chinese document image processing, text and/or graphical block detection serves as an essential step in document layout analysis that in turn permits the effective reasoning about the logical relationships among various text paragraphs and graphical entities for the purpose of document understanding. This paper presents a novel computational paradigm for extracting text/graphic blocks from Chinese document images, which is based on a notion of distributed autonomous agents. The primary features of the agents lie in that they are (1) adaptive to the locality of given images and hence efficient in locating the homogeneous image blocks, (2) reliable in performing image processing as the computation proceeds simultaneously from different image locations, (3) less sensitive to the noise in the given images as the computation disperses gracefully when it is moving away from the homogeneous blocks, and (4) easy to represent in their behaviors and evolvable in their performance. The paper, first of all, describes the formalisms as well as the behavioral characteristics of the agents, which is followed by a demonstration of the agents in detecting document blocks from some real-life images.

Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987–91) is widely regarded as one of the most important artworks in the global contemporary art canon; a spectacular installation comprised of an invented lexicon of 4000 pseudo-Chinese characters laboriously hand-carved and printed onto rice paper scrolls that is utterly illegible. Some two decades later, Xu published Book from the Ground: From Point to Point (2014), a 112-page ‘graphic novel’ written entirely in the international visual vernacular of emoji, icons and symbols culled from the Internet, which according to the artist, ‘virtually anyone can read’. This article explores how the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with visual over verbal forms of communication both plays to the idealization of the Chinese logograph as a model for a ‘new media literacy’ in the global imaginary, whilst also reflecting the culturally-coded anxieties centred on the murky politics of language, and the language of politics, in modern and contemporary China. Reading between the lines of what is touted to be an ‘open book’, it considers the degree to which the banal panoply of utterly conventional signs that constitute the Book from the Ground might be encrypted with a subversive subtext – one that is in dialogue with grassroots forms of online resistance that similarly play on the visual-verbal properties of the Chinese logograph to subvert the limitations placed on the seeable and sayable in contemporary China.

Text effect transfer aims at learning the mapping between text visual effects while maintaining the text content. While remarkably successful, existing methods have limited robustness in font transfer and weak generalization ability to unseen effects. To address these problems, we propose FET-GAN, a novel end-to-end framework to implement visual effects transfer with font variation among multiple text effects domains. Our model achieves remarkable results both on arbitrary effect transfer between texts and effect translation from text to graphic objects. By a few-shot fine-tuning strategy, FET-GAN can generalize the transfer of the pre-trained model to the new effect. Through extensive experimental validation and comparison, our model advances the state-of-the-art in the text effect transfer task. Besides, we have collected a font dataset including 100 fonts of more than 800 Chinese and English characters. Based on this dataset, we demonstrated the generalization ability of our model by the application that complements the font library automatically by few-shot samples. This application is significant in reducing the labor cost for the font designer.

Structurally describing the portrayal-related information by using a standalone Digital Cartographic Model on top of a Digital Landscape Model has been proved applicable and beneficial for 2D mapping but has not yet been applied to 3D cadastre. This study, therefore, evaluates the applicability of digital cartographic model and the corresponding visualization pipeline for 3D cadastre in the context of Chinese urban cadastre. This research starts by identifying the requirements and design features of 3D cadastre mapping through a literature review and interviews with users and cartographers. Addressing the limitations of the existing general-purpose models, this paper proposes an ad hoc 3D cadastre digital cartographic model. The main developments of the proposed model are the inclusion of 3D content modeling, the support of the compound 3D symbols, and the introduction of the semantic transformation. The proposed model is then embedded into three parts of the cadastre visualization pipeline: the symbolic rule design, graphic content creation, and scene dissemination. The empirical result of qualitative proof-of-concept user tests supports that the proposed visualization pipeline is applicable and yields promising visualization results. The digital cartographic model-based visualization pipeline is a novel 3D cadastre mapping paradigm that facilitates designing, producing, sharing, and administrating.

When a researcher is devoted to a specific interest, an essential part of his strategy as a scientist is to influence with his own knowledge the core of international researchers within the field. In fact, in each specialty there are concentric nuclei of larger (international), intermediate (national), and small (regional) influence in the scientific orientation of a certain area of knowledge. This is the reason for the existence of scientific journals: the open and free discussion of experimental findings, hypotheses and theories, not only from Experimental Sciences but also from Social Sciences and Humanities [1].Before focusing on scientific journals, it is necessary to elucidate the fundamental difference between scientific and academic journals. The first is a trusted communication channel of a broad, international and in some cases interdisciplinary scientific community; and the second represents the advances of an academic community, sometimes only publishing the research of a particular institution. This difference allows us to better understand the demands of quality and rigor of a scientific journal.Another definition of Scientific Journal could be a periodical publication, whose object is the scientific communication that results in the advancement of science, normally publishing novel investigations that have been evaluated and verified through a peer review process. The journals involve the scientific method since it is an essential part in their last phase: communication and publication of results [2].Scientific journals constitute the means through which researchers share their achievements and review the research conducted by their colleagues in their respective disciplines. They are the mechanism by which an editorial team, adopting a peer review system, transforms a manuscript into a scientific article. Correspondingly, the scientific edition is a fundamental component in the cycle of scientific knowledge generation. Therefore, it can be affirmed that what a scientific journal with international visibility publishes is Science. This is the importance of the scientific journal in society, thus it highlights the value of the work of the editors, peer reviewers and the publishing institutions. In turn, it imposes an ethical framework for action on all of these actors, which is expressed in a set of good scientific publishing practices commonly accepted throughout the world.The functions of a scientific journals can be summarized as a reliable collective knowledge base, communicating information among scholars. The results that test the hypotheses or respond to the objectives have been obtained through presumably valid methodologies; they represent the frontier of research in a scientific field; they are proof of the findings found by a scientific investigation; likewise, journals Identify the researcher in certain development: finally, the accumulation of articles published over time represents the body of knowledge within the discipline.The edition of scientific journals has undergone radical changes in the last twenty years, since the first fully electronic scientific journals were created, and printed journals began to move to this format. There are several reasons for this necessary evolution: printed journals are more limited than the digital versions, because of the restriction in number of pages, the articles of a particular issue are expected to be approved and assembled at the same time they are printed, printing and distribution costs are high and do not add value to the editorial project, two-dimensional articles (flat graphics, limit on color images, no possibility of recording moving images or animated graphics), low visibility (low circulation, lower distribution and few readers ), sometimes they are locked in library shelves, inability to search by fields or words in the text, lack of hypertextuality (ability to make interconnections between texts), which results in publication delays, and some other restrictions. In short, today the scientific publication is digital.The evolution of scientific journals leads to their recognition as an indispensable instrument for science in all fields of knowledge, without any other cultural artifact that replaces it completely or that fulfills its functions effectively - the thematic repositories and Mega journals are an attempt. The policies of Open Science, Open Data and Open Access are not in conflict with the nature of scientific journals, but instead, they propose a different business model. The scientific journal is a cultural project that is healthful, long-standing, and that will certainly continue to evolve to make the most out of its electronic format.Currently, there are large differences between the number and characteristics of journals between countries and regions. McVeigh announced that the distribution of ISI journals (predecessor of the current WoS) varied significantly according to the region, because their number was much higher in western and English-speaking countries (belonging to the so-called center or scientific nucleus) than in the rest of countries. In fact, North America and Western Europe had 90% of all journals indexed in ISI. The peripheral journals (the rest of the countries) have common peculiarities. For example, they are usually published in local languages, they have less presence of commercial publishers and a smaller number of indexed titles. Among these, Latin American journals have their own characteristics, such as the edition in Spanish and Portuguese, the publication by universities and the wide adoption of open access [3].Some developing countries known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have begun to compete with some Western countries. Sometimes South Korea is included and then the acronym becomes "BRICKS". 40% of the planet's capital lives in those places, including 18% of the global economy [4]. According to Ulrich data, the nucleus (United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Germany) has 41.3% of the world's active scientific journals. BRICS countries publish 19.4% and reached 20.4% if South Korea (BRICKS) is added. Latin America publishes 6.8% and reaches 9.1%. Countries not included in the previous groups share the remaining 30.2%. As for continents, a third part of all journals are published in Western Europe, 22% in North America, 21% in Asia, 12% in Eastern Europe, 7% in Latin America and the remaining 4% between Africa and Oceania.According to country rankings, BRICKS countries have climbed many positions in the world rankings, especially China, but also Russia, India, Brazil and South Korea [5]. The scientific production of all researchers affiliated with academic institutions in a country is related to the production of journals, according to the SJR. Most countries have a similar relative contribution in articles and journals, except for two special cases: The Netherlands and China. The first has a production of articles much lower than that of journals, no doubt due to the Dutch titles of Elsevier, with an eminently contribution of international authors. The opposite is the case of China, since few of its journals are indexed in sources of international impact and Chinese researchers tend to publish in foreign journals. Other emerging countries such as India, South Korea and Russia follow similar patterns and are more productive in articles than in journals. Some of these do not publish many journals, nor do they have a large number of top-level academic institutions, but they have many researchers who publish their articles in journals in other countries.The dominance of the United States has been compromised by the explosive growth in productivity of China, which is the second largest economy in absolute terms throughout the reference period 1996-2014, a position in which it has settled since 2005. It is also worth noting some rising powers such as India, South Korea and Brazil. On the European periphery, some countries are declining (for example, France, Switzerland, Poland and Sweden) and some others are stable (Spain and Italy, mainly) [4].

This article attempts to use an integrated theoretical framework to examine the three graphic novels published in Taiwan based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. After the concept of intertextuality (Kristeva, 1980), Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) visual grammar helps us to explore how the visual semiotic resources in three Taiwanese graphic novel editions of Little Women ascribe meanings, achieve functions and communicate ideologies to enhance the characterization of Jo March. Progressing from the images, image–text relationships are discussed in terms of how these signifiers shape signs and meaning. Finally, by exploring speech or thought representation, the researcher investigates the translators’ awareness of the readers and situates their use of signs socially and culturally. In this study, the integrated framework reveals how these semiotic resources characterize Jo March, and the double meanings (Kristeva, 1980, pp. 65–66) they present, differently. These characterisations may, in turn, may have affected the communicative function of each version. The study concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these applications.

Abstract This review summarizes the process of the discovery, research, and development of a cardioactive component, mesaconine, from the lateral roots of Aconitum carmichaelii (“Fu Zi”). To date, pre-clinical showed that mesaconine is a novel type of cardiotonic lead drug with relatively high potency, low toxicity, and a new mechanism. Graphic Abstract

La presente investigación abarca el campo de la traducción de cómics y novelas gráficas desde un enfoque multimodal. Es usual encontrar investigaciones que analicen los recursos lingüísticos empleados en la traducción de cómics, pero muy pocos se centran en la interdependencia del texto e imagen en la construcción de una identidad. En este caso, se busca identificar las formas de representación y autorrepresentación de la chinidad (chineseness) en las versiones fuente en francés y las versiones meta en español de las novelas gráficas Shenzhen de Guy Delisle y Une vie chinoise de Philippe Otié y Li Kunwu. Esto se dará bajo un análisis de corpus multimodal que permitirá demostrar cómo el texto y la imagen construyen este imaginario y si se mantiene la representación y autorrepresentación en las versiones traducidas, por lo que se toman en cuenta también las estrategias de traducción aplicadas.
The following study focused on the comics and graphic novels translation under a multimodal approach. There is several research that analyze linguistic resources used in comics translation, but only a few focus on the interrelation between text and image when it comes to the construction of an identity. This study will help to identify in which ways the representation and self-representation of Chineseness is presented in the source version in French and target version in Spanish of both graphic novels: Shenzhen by Guy Delisle and Une vie chinoise by Philippe Otié and Li Kunwu. A multimodal corpus analysis will be applied to demonstrate how text and image build this imaginary. Furthermore, identifying the translation strategies applied in the Spanish version will allow us to recognize if this representation and self-representation is maintained in the translations.
Trabajo de investigación

The current contribution aims at describing some key-aspects of Rocchi and Demonte’s graphic novels “Primavere e Autunni” (2015) and “Chinamen” (2017), especially in relation to: 1) the historical reconstruction of Chinese migration to Italy; 2) the challenge of widespreading negative stereotypes against Chinese migrants, which still characterize dominant public discourse in Italian society. The first paragraph will highlight theoretical aspects of both works, in particular relation to the literature on migration and of migration, with Sinoitalian literature, as well as with macro- and micro-aspects of Chinese migration to Italy. After that, some common points of both works will be underlined, including structure and style, semiotic aspects, communicative functions and multimodality. The third paragraph will specifically focus on a series of key-figures described in the graphic novels, which contribute to draw the attention to specific aspects regarding Chinese historical presence in Milan and in Italy.

The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and translations, exhibitions, graphic novels, radio plays, and movies inspired by his life and work, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Maria Schrader’s Vor der Morgenröte. At the same heated debates about the writer’s literary merit flared up again. This introduction provides an overview of the international reception history of Zweig, whose works have been translated into more than sixty languages since the 1920s, while causing relentless aversion and controversy among scholars and critics. This chapter also explains why the Chinese reception with its wealth of unexplored material spanning almost the whole twentieth century serves as the ideal case study not only to re-read Zweig’s work but also to rethink our understanding of cross-cultural literary connections as complex “global systems of cultural transfer.”

Due to limited knowledge carried by queries, traditional dialogue systems often face the dilemma of generating boring responses, leading to poor user experience. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a novel infobox knowledge-aware dialogue generation approach, HITA-Graph, with three unique features. First, open-domain infobox tables that describe entities with relevant attributes are adopted as the knowledge source. An order-irrelevance Hierarchical Infobox Table Encoder is proposed to represent an infobox table at three levels of granularity. In addition, an Infobox-Dialogue Interaction Graph Network is built to effectively integrate the infobox context and the dialogue context into a unified infobox representation. Second, a Hierarchical Infobox Attribute Attention mechanism is developed to access the encoded infobox knowledge at different levels of granularity. Last but not least, a Dynamic Mode Fusion strategy is designed to allow the Decoder to select a vocabulary word or copy a word from the given infobox/query. We extract infobox tables from Chinese Wikipedia and construct an infobox knowledge base. Extensive evaluation on an open-released Chinese corpus demonstrates the superior performance of our approach against several representative methods.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) store much structured information on various entities, many of which are not covered by the parallel sentence pairs of neural machine translation (NMT). To improve the translation quality of these entities, in this paper we propose a novel KGs enhanced NMT method. Specifically, we first induce the new translation results of these entities by transforming the source and target KGs into a unified semantic space. We then generate adequate pseudo parallel sentence pairs that contain these induced entity pairs. Finally, NMT model is jointly trained by the original and pseudo sentence pairs. The extensive experiments on Chinese-to-English and Englishto-Japanese translation tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the strong baseline models in translation quality, especially in handling the induced entities.