English Studies at NBU

The gravity of academic plagiarism in the perception of scholars, students, and science policy makers in Bulgaria

Irena Vassileva, Diana Yankova, Mariya Chankova — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The ever-increasing spread of plagiarism in academia requires development of strategies to combat it so as to increase the prestige of Bulgarian scholars at the international and local level. Therefore, the main goals of the project are to analyze the concept of plagiarism in academia, arriving at a clear and detailed definition, applicable in practice to create efficient methods to combat it, and to investigate its understanding by students, scholars and science managers to establish the discrepancies between the nature of plagiarism and its perception in the Bulgarian academic community. Expected results: (1) Theoretical – elicitation of a definition of plagiarism; drafting of comprehensive legal and administrative approaches to combat plagiarism; design of a sociological methodology for a study of the problem. (2) Applied - transfer of knowledge; creating guidelines for combating plagiarism; raising the awareness of Bulgarian academe about the severity of plagiarism as a violation of academic ethics.

Turkish-to-English short story translation by DeepL: Human evaluation by trainees and translation professionals vs. automatic evaluation

Halise Gülmüş Sırkıntı — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This mixed-methods study aims to evaluate the quality of Turkish-to-English literary machine translation by DeepL, incorporating both human and automatic evaluation metrics while engaging translation trainees and professional translators. Raw MT output of two short stories, Mendil Altında and Kabak Çekirdekçi, evaluated by both groups via TAUS DQF tool and evaluators wrote reports on the detected errors. Additionally, BLEU was employed for automatic evaluation. The results indicate a consensus between trainees and professionals in assessing MT accuracy and fluency. Accuracy rates were 80.59% and 80.50% for Mendil Altında, and 73.08% and 82.35% for Kabak Çekirdekçi. Fluency rates were similarly close, 71.96% and 72.32% for Mendil Altında, and 66.81% and 62.09% for Kabak Çekirdekçi. Bleu scores, particularly 1-gram results, align with the human evaluators’ results. Furthermore, reports show that trainees provided more detailed analysis, frequently using meta-language, suggesting that increased exposure to metrics enhances trainees’ ability to identify fine-grained MT errors.

Self-repair and motivation in legal and medical simultaneous interpreting: reflections from student Interpreters

Olcay Şener Erkırtay — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The present study examines the similarities and differences in the use of self-repairs by student interpreters during simultaneous interpreting of two different speech types, medical and legal, as well as the underlying motivations behind these repairs. With this aim in mind, this case study involves an English-to-Turkish simultaneous interpreting experiment with 7 senior student interpreters enrolled in Simultaneous Interpreting course at a major university in İzmir, Türkiye, and corroborated with a post-experiment questionnaire and student reflective reports within the scope of Schön’s concept of “reflection”. Shen and Liang’s taxonomy of self-repair strategies was used for data analysis, and findings were then discussed in line with Daniel Gile’s Effort Model. The findings revealed that challenges arising from syntactic asymmetries, cognitive load, and short-term memory triggered student interpreters’ self-repairs during the interpreting process. As for the self-repair strategies, repetition comes forward as the most commonly used type in both speech types, yet there is a statistical difference between the total number used in the legal and the medical speech. Furthermore, the students’ statements showed no correlation between the number of self-repairs, speech difficulty, and perceived interpreting performance. This finding suggests that self-repair is not always an indicator of poor interpreting performance and error correction; instead, it can serve as a cognitive strategy to manage time, achieve semantic clarity, and enhance the comprehensibility of renditions.

Who dropped the sword of Stalingrad?

Boris Naimushin — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On November 29, 1943, at a ceremony at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran in the presence of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill presented Marshal Stalin with a Sword of Honour as a gift from King George VI to the 'steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad'. According to an ‘enduring legend’ (Higgins, 1993), Stalin was surprised by the sword’s weight and dropped it on the floor after he took it from Churchill. This article investigates this ‘legend’ to see whether the sword was dropped and, if yes, who dropped it. In doing so, available memoirs, visuals, and newspaper sources are used. Autobiographical subjectivity is discussed in view of the conflicting accounts from the people who were at the center of the ceremony and close to it, i.e. Winston Churchill, the British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the interpreters Arthur Birse (UK), Hugh Lunghi (UK), Charles Bohlen (USA), and Valentin Berezhkov (USSR). An unambiguous answer to the research question is given by two items of video footage taken during the ceremony, despite the obvious efforts to edit out the embarrassing moment.

Metafiction and representation of gendered identity in Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl’

Soheila Farhani Nejad — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines the interplay of gender stereotypes in crime narratives through the lens of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Flynn's novel challenges traditional portrayals of women in crime fiction, positioning them not merely as victims but as complex anti-heroines capable of orchestrating elaborate criminal plots fueled by vengeance and psychological manipulation. The paper highlights the metafictional elements in Gone Girl, where the author employs self-conscious storytelling to critique societal expectations surrounding gender roles. By intertwining themes of media representation, domesticity, and the neoliberal notion of choice, the paper underscores how Flynn's narrative structure critiques the commodification of female identity and the performative aspects of gender roles and identity. Ultimately, the study posits that Flynn's work serves as a thought-provoking commentary on the power dynamics inherent in the representation of gender in contemporary media culture, revealing the complexities of identity as shaped by societal constructs.

Rethinking genetic borders in ‘The Hunger Games’

Kevser Ateş — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Emphasizing the fading distinction between reality and artificiality due to the innovations in the fields of science and biotechnology, this paper argues that the fantasy world depicted by science fiction is no longer far from today’s reality. Although technological advancements have enabled us to live more comfortably, when they are misused by those seeking to use them as a sign of power or superiority, they can have disastrous effects on both people and the environment. This study explores how an oppressive regime called Capitol in The Hunger Games employs science and technology to transform animals and humans into commodities within the arena, reducing them to instruments of entertainment. The Games’ intentional replacement of natural beings with biotechnological mutations serves as a deliberate display of power, employing genetically engineered species as weapons and reviving the dead as monsters. This not only captivates the audience but also strengthens the regime’s superiority, exemplifying how technology is weaponized to manipulate both fear and entertainment.

Henry James and The Aspern papers: Archive, memory, and the failure of biography

Domeniko Kvartuč — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines The Aspern Papers by Henry James through the lens of archive theory, biographical ethics, and the complexities of memory preservation. It explores how the protagonist’s obsessive pursuit of Aspern’s documents represents the human desire to reconstruct the Romantic past in Gothic atmosphere of Venice, often at the expense of ethical considerations and lived experience. The analysis highlights the symbolic significance of Juliana Bordereau, not merely as a guardian of Aspern’s legacy but as a living archive whose testimony remains undervalued. The paper connects James’s themes to his personal decision to destroy his own letters, reflecting his scepticism toward biographical intrusions. Comparisons with The Sense of the Past and other Jamesian works illustrate recurring motifs of archival failure and the tension between material and immaterial memory, as well as the role of destruction – both literal, through the burning of documents, and metaphorical, through the erasure of identities – in shaping historical narrative. Finally, the discussion extends to the ethical responsibilities of archivists and biographers, questioning whether written records alone can ever truly encapsulate the essence of a life.

Emotional void and identity fragmentation: madness and narcissism in “Lady Audley's Secret” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862).

Paolo Lantieri — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This research aims at investigating the psychological dimension of the protagonist Lady Audley on the grounds of the dialectic of alleged madness and assumed narcissistic personality disorder related to psychoanalytic literary methodology and criticism. In the light of the first Freudian studies of the first decade of the twentieth century and the subsequent outcomes, we attempt the hypothesis of female identity construction onto typically narcissistic features, in the perspective of Freud’s unconscious anticipated by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in her prose generating not only a sensation novel but also an innovative psychological plot depicting the double nature of Victorian society from the perspective of a woman labeled as insane.

Extraction of anglicisms from a corpus of Macedonian magazine texts

Lina Miloshevska — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The present article is a description of the stages involved in compiling a specialized corpus of Macedonian magazine texts and the software tools employed to extract anglicisms from the corpus. The texts were collected from the magazine Kapital and cover two distinct periods: the years 2000 and 2020. The size of the corpus is about 2 million tokens and 141,852 types. The software employed produced word lists that later in combination with other statistical techniques produced a refined Anglicism headword list from which new anglicisms were extracted. In addition to the software tools, careful manual inspection was necessary in both the extraction and analysis stages. As a result of the research, a total of 220 completely new anglicisms have been identified. Most of these new anglicisms are not yet included in existing Macedonian dictionaries.

Risk management in translation – Book review

Antony Hoyte-West — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Book Details

Title: Risk Management in Translation

Author: Anthony Pym

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 76 pages

Year of publication: 2025

ISBN:
9781009546874 (paperback),

9781009546843 (hardback),

9781009546836 (eBook)

New insights into interpreting studies. Technology, society and access - Book review

Alina Pelea — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Book Details

Title: New Insights into Interpreting Studies. Technology, Society and Access

Volume Editors: Agnieszka Biernacka, Wojciech Figiel

Publisher: Peter Lang, 304 pages

Year of publication: 2024

ISBN:
9783631884850 (hardcover),

9783631907139 (ePub),

9783631907122 (PDF)