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The reception and study of Jane Austen in China have undergone considerable transformation over the past century. Initially undervalued or misunderstood, Austen’s works have gained increasing recognition and scholarly attention in recent decades. Her writings were first introduced in the early twentieth century, but interest declined after the founding of the People’s Republic of China and virtually disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, when cultural activity beyond political propaganda entered a period of suspension. The reform and opening-up policy of 1978 brought cultural liberalization, stimulating renewed engagement with Western literature and gradually expanding research on Austen. Since then, all of Austen’s major novels have been translated into Chinese, and her critical reputation has risen rapidly. From the outset, Chinese scholarship has emphasized the ideological dimensions of Austen’s works particularly issues of love, marriage, morality, and social values with feminist approaches receiving sustained attention. Studies of women’s subjectivity, the marriage system, and female social roles have significantly broadened Austen research, especially since the 1980s. Despite its relatively short history, Chinese Austen scholarship has developed rapidly in both scope and depth. Nevertheless, limitations remain. Much research has concentrated on individual works or narrow thematic categories such as marriage and love, which, while insightful, risk overlooking Austen’s broader literary vision and worldview.

During the height of the Pacific War, Japan recruited Koreans with English-language abilities and deployed them across newly occupied Southeast Asia as POW guards. A number of these young men were assigned to the construction sites of the Thailand Burma Railway and were prosecuted as B- and C-class war criminals after the war. The records left by the ad hoc interpreters stationed at the most brutal work site the construction of the bridge over the River Kwai reveal the profound ethical and practical dilemmas they faced as linguistic mediators working in two languages not their own and positioned between two hostile parties. In contrast, accounts produced by British, American, and Australian prisoners of war portray Korean guards not merely as interpreters of the violence they were instructed to convey, but as its direct perpetrators. Their visibility as “interpreters” rendered the violence associated with them even more indelible. Following Japan’s defeat, these men stigmatized as “interpreters of the defeated nation” were effectively abandoned by both Korea and Japan. Yet these ad hoc interpreters must be integrated into the history of interpreting in Korea, for the ethical dilemmas they confronted resonate with those faced by interpreters today. Interpreting studies must therefore move beyond a narrow focus on professional interpreters to encompass all those who were compelled, under varied and often coercive circumstances, to act as interpreters.

This paper offers a comparative philosophical inquiry into Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao’s doctrine of “neither existence nor nonexistence”( ) and Zhuangzi’s more radical formulation of “neither the negation of existence nor the negation of nonexistence”( ). Focusing on Buddhist discussions of dependent origination, emptiness, and the Two Truths, the paper examines how Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way is received and transformed in Sengzhao’s Prajñā thought, particularly through the concepts of non-coming and non-going( ), non-migration( ), and neither existence nor nonexistence. These Buddhist formulations are then placed in dialogue with Zhuangzi’s dialectical reflections on adaptive coming and going( ) and his employment of paradoxical negation that transcends binary oppositions. The analysis argues that Sengzhao’s philosophy does not merely negate movement, existence, or causality, but articulates a dynamic interdependence between movement and stillness, saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, existence and emptiness. Zhuangzi’s thought, in turn, anticipates a similar logic through his rejection of fixed distinctions between being and non-being, affirmation and negation. By juxtaposing these traditions, the paper highlights a shared non-dualistic horizon in which conventional distinctions are neither absolutized nor dismissed, but reinterpreted as mutually implicative.

This study investigates how effectively generative AI models reproduce the stylistic features of Korean emotional essays in Japanese translation. Using I Decided to Live as Myself, we compared human translation with three AI-generated translations. Semantic similarity was measured with BERTScore, and stylistic variation was assessed through sentence-level embedding distances based on SentenceTransformer. The quantitative results show stable semantic fidelity across AI models but considerable divergence in stylistic embeddings, indicating stylistic variation despite preserved meaning. Qualitative analysis further revealed differences in sentence structuring, emotional tone, cultural contextualization, and information organization between human and AI translations. The findings demonstrate that meaning and style can diverge substantially in emotional-text translation and that AI models reproduce stylistic cues only partially. This study provides foundational insight for developing stylistic evaluation metrics and advancing research on AI translation of emotion-centered texts.

The particle est-ce que is the most recently introduced in the French language among the three interrogative modality markers. First appearing in use in the 16th century, est-ce que today conveys formality and politeness, contrary of its original purpose to adhere to the word order of declarative sentences. Our examination of the prosodic features of French interrogative forms suggests that the expression of formality and politeness in est-ce que questions is related to the intonational patterns by which they are spoken. This article first outlines the historical development of French interrogative forms, and then introduces the main controversial issues surrounding the etymology and functions of est-ce que. Subsequently, it examines the intonational characteristics of declarative word-order questions, inverted questions, and est-ce que questions. Finally, the article describes how est-ce que questions convey formality and politeness with regard to their intonational properties.

This study presents a critical analysis of 『話てみよう！釜山語』, a Korean dialect learning book published in Japan that introduces the Busan dialect to foreign learners. While the global demand for Korean language education continues to grow, most instructional materials remain focused on the standard language, and resources that systematically address regional dialects are still limited. Against this backdrop, this study examines how a Korean dialect is explained and presented to foreign learners through a close analysis of the learning book’s structure, linguistic content, and modes of presentation. The analysis focuses on the organization of phonological, grammatical, and lexical information, the selection and presentation of dialectal expressions, and the use of audio materials to support pronunciation and intonation. In addition, the study discusses the intended learner level of the material and its characteristics as a learning book designed primarily for cultural or interest-based learning rather than for formal classroom instruction. Based on these observations, the study identifies both the strengths and limitations of the material and derives implications for Korean dialect learning resources. Rather than generalizing from a single case, this study aims to provide foundational insights into how Korean dialects may be introduced to foreign learners and how dialect learning materials can contribute to linguistic understanding as well as cultural awareness. The findings are intended to inform future discussions on Korean dialect education and the design of dialect-related learning resources.

This study analyzes the interaction between Sheng, the urban youth language of Nairobi, and popular culture, and explores the linguistic and social transformations that emerge from this process. Sheng originated in the 1970s among young people in Nairobi’s informal settlements as a hybrid language based on Swahili and English, incorporating diverse ethnic vocabularies and neologisms, and has since spread rapidly. Focusing on the impact of youth popular culture, this study examines how Sheng has undergone processes of both “evolution” and “fragmentation.” The findings show that popular culture particularly hip hop and Gengetone functioned not only as channels of linguistic diffusion but also as platforms enabling youth communities to generate new expressions that reflect their local experiences and cultural practices. The convergence of local artists and social media further reinforced neighborhood-specific variants and accelerated their circulation beyond local contexts. Consequently, Sheng has developed into both a medium for constructing hybrid youth identities and a fragmented linguistic phenomenon shaped by locality and group affiliation. These results demonstrate that Sheng embodies the dual processes of integration and fragmentation within the social and cultural practices of Kenyan youth. Moreover, Sheng transcends conventional linguistic and cultural boundaries, creating new spaces for popular culture, and pointing to the expanding possibilities of youth cultural expression.

The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of the linguistic landscape of Centum City, a planned new urban district in Busan, by analyzing language use on commercial signage. To this end, the study analyzes 403 building-mounted commercial signs from the Centum City area and presents the following four major findings. First, while Hangul remains the most frequently used script overall, Roman letters appear as the main or a visually salient element in more than half of the signs. This pattern is closely related to the spatial context of Centum City as a planned urban commercial area. Second, the form and function of Roman-letter signage vary systematically across business sectors. English-based forms are predominant in cafés and dessert shops, sports and fitness facilities, convenience stores, and educational institutes. In the restaurant sector, English-based forms, Japanese-based romanization, and newly coined names coexist depending on subsectors. In fashion, beauty, and furniture or interior design businesses, coined names that emphasize visual impression and design-oriented branding rather than lexical meaning are particularly prominent. Third, financial institutions exhibit a highly standardized system in which Roman-letter initialisms and logotype-based signage (e.g., KB, IBK, NH, SC) are applied uniformly across branches according to nationwide brand guidelines, indicating the strong influence of institutionalized, top-down regulation on the formation of the linguistic landscape. Finally, a collective place identity is constructed not through architectural uniformity but through the repeated incorporation of the toponym Centum in shop and building names, functioning as a symbolic resource associated with the planned district. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the linguistic landscape of Centum City is characterized by sector-specific functional differentiation, brand strategies, institutional standardization, and toponym-based naming practices. By closely examining this case, the study provides a comparative analytical framework for future research on the linguistic landscapes of planned urban commercial spaces in Korea.