InContext - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2025

This study reimagines the role and significance of Japanese language education within Colombian higher education, positioning it as a civic-oriented and intercultural practice rather than a merely instrumental pursuit of linguistic proficiency. Drawing upon Biesta’s (2011, 2009, 2006) theory of the three educational functions: qualification, socialization, and subjectification, and integrating perspectives from Critical Content-Based Instruction (CCBI) (Sato et al., 2017; Sato, Takami, et al., 2015), symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2011), and Translanguaging, the paper argues that language education must foster civic competence, ethical reflection, and intercultural understanding.

The research situates Japanese language learning within Colombia’s multilingual policy framework, where less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) such as Japanese have the potential to diversify academic offerings and promote inclusive global citizenship. Comparative analyses of Japanese and Colombian educational philosophies, particularly the Colombian Constitution (1991) and Japan’s Basic Act on Education (1947/2006), reveal shared commitments to dignity, social responsibility, and civic formation, while also highlighting different cultural emphases.

Building on institutional missions and policy documents from Colombian universities, the study underscores how higher education can integrate language education into broader strategies for ethical and civic development. Empirical references to Japan Foundation surveys (2017–2023) demonstrate that, despite its small scale, Japanese language education in Colombia has a strong foothold in higher education and functions as a platform for intercultural collaboration and academic diplomacy.

Through the case of a university seminar on Ikigai and Japanese Popular Culture, the study illustrates how reflective and dialogic approaches can transform language classrooms into spaces for self-understanding, intercultural dialogue, and civic engagement. The paper further proposes a CEFR–JLPT–Civic Competence correspondence framework that links language profi cy with democratic participation and ethical leadership.

Ultimately, this theoretical reconstruction positions Japanese language education as a strategic component of Colombia’s multilingual and multicultural vision. Beyond developing communicative skills, it contributes to forming critically engaged, socially responsible citizens who can mediate meaning across cultures and act ethically in pluralistic societies.

This article seeks to provide a comparative analysis of the reaction of the British public and the British government to reported cases of animal cruelty in South Korea and in Spain in the late 1980s by examining relevant government papers produced by the British Foreign Office which are housed in the National Archives in Kew, England. As South Korea geared up to host the 1988 Summer Olympics, various British media publications printed articles depicting the dog-slaughtering and dog-eating practices in Korea in lurid detail. Outraged and dismayed by such reports, prominent animal rights organisations as well as ordinary members of the British public organized nationwide petitions and sent letters to the Korean Embassy in London, to various Members of Parliament, to the Foreign Secretary, to the Prime Minister and even to Buckingham Palace protesting against such Korean practices and demanding that the British government apply pressure on the Korean authorities to introduce anti-cruelty legislation and issue a threat to boycott the Seoul Olympics should the Korean government refuse to take appropriate action. The British government replied that government ministers personally shared the British public’s “disgust” at the practices mentioned, that the Korean authorities were aware of the “revulsion” felt by the British people and that the British government would monitor the situation and raise the issue with the Korean authorities whenever suitable occasions arose. Around about the same time, the British media also published stories about local festivals in Spain where donkeys and other animals were being either crushed or strangled to death in addition to the traditional bullfighting. The British public’s fury at these reports was on a par with the reaction towards the Korean practices. But the British government’s response to the Spanish instances were markedly different to that demonstrated towards the Korean cases. The British authorities stated firmly and unequivocally that they could not interfere in the internal matters of another country, had no intention of using European Economic Community legislation to curb such practices and advised all protesters to send their correspondence to the Spanish embassy in London, even though the embassy officials had informed the Foreign Office that they would not deal with such communications.

This essay explores the metamodernist engagement with Virginia Woolf in contemporary Australian fiction, focusing on how authors reimagine modernist legacies through narrative experimentation, ethical inquiry, and historical revision. Drawing on David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s defintion of metamodernism as a mode that revisits and reconfigures modernist aesthetics, the essay examines three recent Australian novels — John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives (2020), Michelle Cahill’s Daisy and Woolf (2022), and Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever (2022) — to illustrate the diverse ways Woolf’s influence is interrogated and transformed. Scott’s Shorter Lives engages in poetic and temporal play, constructing a speculative biography of Virginia Stephen that blends past and future through typographic and intertextual cues. His narrative disrupts linear chronology, echoing modernist techniques while embedding Woolf’s legacy within a metafictional framework. Cahill’s Daisy and Woolf adopts a more overtly ethical stance, reclaiming themarginalised character of Daisy Simmons from Mrs Dalloway to critique Woolf’s racial and class biases. Through autofiction and epistolary form, Cahill challenges the exclusions of modernist feminism and asserts fiction’s potential for moral redress. Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever offers a more ambivalent approach, using ghostly dialogues with Leonard and Virginia Woolf to refl ct on the limits of historical understanding and literary responsibility. Her protagonist, Alice Fox, confronts the futility and necessity of writing, ultimately embracing the contradictions inherent in metamodernist inquiry. Together, these works form a continuum of metamodernist responses to Woolf, ranging from experimental homage to ethical confrontation. The essay situates these texts within broader debates in modernist studies, neo-Victorian fiction, and postcolonial critique, arguing that Australian literature plays a vital role in global metamodernist discourse. It concludes by questioning whether contemporary fiction can truly atone for historical injustices or whether it merely replays the moral anxieties of the Victorian past. In doing so, the essay suggests that our continued fascination with Woolf refl cts both a desire to inherit modernism’s revolutionary aesthetics and a compulsion tojudge its ethical shortcomings.

The Three-Body trilogy by Liu Cixin, a milestone of contemporary Chinese science fiction (SF), celebrates the tenth anniversary of its historic Hugo Award win in 2025. The trilogy has attracted worldwide attention through its translations and represents a key moment in the global circulation of Chinese literature over the past decade. This paper adopts a socio-discursive perspective to examine the translation, dissemination, and reception of the trilogy in the English-speaking world, situating it within broader debates on cross-cultural literary exchange and the global circulation of SF. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the study argues that the trilogy’s global success resulted from the coordinated efforts of a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors, including the author, editor, translators, publisher, literary agent, critics, fandom, as well as social media platforms, all of which collectively shaped both the translation and its reception through continuous negotiations and interactions. This collaborative process not only brought the novel series commercial success and literary recognition on the world stage, but also enabled Chinese SF and its futuristic discourse to establish legitimacy and challenge dominant interpretive frameworks within the Anglophone literary fi ld. The analysis further illustrates how translators, guided by an ethos of harmonizing diversity, carefully balanced the cultural distinctiveness of the source text with narrative vitality for English-speaking readers. In addition, the study examines the extended network of literary reception. Reviewers from both the professional SF community and the general readership, media outlets, and other stakeholders played a key role in shaping the trilogy’s global significance and in positioning Chinese SF within broader intercultural dialogue. Ultimately, the enduring impact of the trilogy lies in the poetics of SF itself, which offers a narrative platform for imagining a shared future for humanity beyond cultural and national boundaries. By tracing these processes, the paper demonstrates how SF can serve as both a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding and a site where literary, cultural, and translational forces converge to produce global literary phenomena.

Subjectivity and objectivity constitute fundamental conceptual dualities in philosophical discourse, particularly pertinent to systematic investigations of error generation mechanisms in professional domains. This paper conducts a multidimensional examination of the underlying mechanisms governing translation inaccuracies, proposing an innovative taxonomy that systematically classifies error-inducing factors into two principal categories: subjective elements rooted in the translator’s constitution and objective determinants arising from operational ecosystems.

The subjective paradigm encompasses four interdependent dimensions: physiological constraints (including neurological fatigue and circadian rhythm variations), psychological states (such as affective instability and attentional lapses), perceptual filters shaped by cultural schemata, and cognitive architectures governing bilingual processing efficacy. Contrastively, objective determinants comprise tripartite external influences: linguistic complexities embedded in source texts (e.g., terminological ambiguity and cultural-specifi metaphors), technological limitations of computer-assisted translation tools (including alignment errors and terminology management deficiencies), and environmental perturbations within the workspace (notably auditory distractions and ergonomic stressors).

Through empirical analysis of translation corpora and process tracing methodologies, this study reveals that 68% of persistent errors demonstrate systematic patterns correlating with these identified variables. The development of a diagnostic matrix integrating these dual mechanisms enables practitioners to perform root-cause analysis of recurring errors while formulating evidence-based remediation protocols. This analytical framework not only minimizes semantic distortions and procedural inefficiencies but also enhances process stability by reducing performance variances to within ±5% tolerance thresholds across comparable tasks. Furthermore, it advances translation studies by establishing measurable parameters for assessing competency development and informing adaptive workflow designs.

The cross-disciplinary implications of these findings manifest in three operational domains: First, in pedagogical contexts, they inform competency-based curricula incorporating cognitive load optimization techniques and environmental simulation training. Second, they enable the creation of hybrid quality assurance models combining quantitative error pattern recognition with qualitative translator self-assessment metrics. Third, from a technological perspective, these insights guide the development of adaptive neural machine translation systems capable of context-aware terminology disambiguation and real-time cognitive assistance. Field implementation data indicate that applying this framework reduces post-editing requirements by 42% while improving translational precision metrics by 28%, substantively advancing the operational effi cy and academic rigor of translation practices.

This study examines the implementation of peer feedback as an assessment-as-learning tool in simultaneous interpreting (SI) training within interpreter education. While instructor feedback remains indispensable, peer feedback offers potential to enrich students’ learning experiences. However, its adoption in SI has been limited due to the signifi ant cognitive demands of the task, novices’ underdeveloped assessment skills, and students’ reluctance to critique their peers. This study sought to overcome these challenges by implementing a structured three-level feedback framework with targeted training and multimodal technological support. Conducted over 16 weeks in an introductory SI course at a graduate institute in Taiwan, the study involved eight first-year students participating in four structured rounds of asynchronous peer feedback activities. The framework comprised three levels: the product level (evaluating accuracy, fluency, and delivery of interpreting output), the process level (diagnosing underlying strategies and cognitive management in interpreting), and the future-plan level (offering actionable suggestions for improvement). Using a video assessment platform with crucial features like dual-track audio control and time-stamped commentary, students provided balanced commentary across accuracy, language quality, and delivery dimensions. Findings revealed benefits for both feedback providers and recipients. Providers developed deeper analytical skills and enhanced metacognitive awareness through evaluating peers’ work, while recipients gained valuable insights into their blind spots, received motivation from explicit positive commentary, and discovered alternative strategic approaches. Students particularly valued future-plan level feedback, indicating a preference for solution-oriented commentary that directly guided subsequent practice. The structured feedback framework and technological support enabled students to move beyond surface-level observations to analyze complex underlying processes and propose targeted improvements. These findings suggest that peer feedback can transform assessment into a powerful, collaborative learning experience in SI training when properly structured and supported, thereby creating opportunities for students to develop essential self-regulation and evaluative skills vital for professional growth within a collaborative learning environment.

In such an increasingly globalised world, the prevalence of translingual practice has become more evident and the group of translingual writers ever more expanded. Against this backdrop, myriads of Chinese nationals and Chinese diaspora embark on a journey to narrate Chinese stories to the English or even foreign audiences by their non-native tongues. Amongst them, Dr. Lin Yutang, renowned for his debut novel Moment in Peking, is one of the earliest yet still influential examples. In that context, back translation of works as such becomes a prominent issue in translation studies. This paper investigates the back-translated version of Moment in Peking (Jinghua Yanyun) produced by Zhang Zhenyu. Through the lens of cultural translation theory, the paper intends to analyse how Zhang adopts the very strategies and techniques and renders Chinese cultural elements in a way acceptable to the Chinese audiences. Following Nida’s classifi ation of cultures, the paper divides specifi Chinese cultures contained in Moment in Peking into three categories: material cultural elements, social cultural elements and religious cultural elements. Within these three categories, selected are nineteen typical examples concerning tackling cultural nuances. All cases include the source text (ST), the target text (TT) and the machine translated text of TT (MT). ST is extracted from Lin’s translingual writing in Moment in Peking, TT from Zhang’s back translated version of Jinghua Yanyun, and MT from Google Translate version of TT. Accordingly, it is found that several strategies and techniques are adopted in Zhang’s back translation practice such as literal translation, free translation, transliteration, domestication, omission, amplification and substitution, while foreignisation is the only strategy left. Altogether, they help to convey the Chinese cultures contained in ST to the TT audiences, the Chinese people and demonstrate how Zhang manages to restore Chinese cultures in back translation in a flexible manner. The paper also sheds some light upon back translation of translingual writing texts in general and of texts related to Chinese culture in particular.