Часть II ПЕРЕВОД МЕДИАТЕКСТОВ
Media Literacy: Education for a Technological Age
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| медиаграммотность to come of age mass mediated and media saturated по сути своей принимать решения to have access to smth соотечественники to afford поиск с помощью компьютера to print illiterate выборка информации to feed (fed, fed) through мгновенный, быстродействующий информационные потоки increasingly находящийся фактически на краю ч.-л. порождать to cut beneath annoyance or apologia исследовать природу (явлений) to apply to refer владеть to challenge the great inequalities производитель a consumer выборы media event удобный момент для съемки package обязательный, необходимый change agents быть активным участником аудитория formidable task ознакомление, осведомленность points of tension political impositions | срочность, безотлагательность потребление медиа saturation городской житель to concern принимать всерьез формировать представления, убеждения и отношения extent and type of influence оказывать существенное влияние to delink from meaning необходимое дополнение влияние approach предлагать to define core concepts личностные ценности violence сцены насилия participant разбивать на части audience "targets" искать образцы, примеры males and females отождествление participant заголовок to reflect точка зрения, позиция судачить a citizen review to require получать сведения, узнавать the profound issues вовлеченный во ч.-л. |
Media literacy has come of age. In a society as mass mediated and media saturated as our own, communication technologies are at the core of the political, economic and cultural environments.
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Yet, how many of us are taught to "read" the media? How many of us know who makes the decisions about the programs that the rest of us see or don't see? What will happen to those of us who don't have access to the latest information technology? To our fellow citizens who can't afford computer-generated searches and costly information resources? To our global citizens who are still print illiterate in an age where competency is based on graphic read-outs fed across the world through instantaneous integrated digital networks?
Media, their messages and their structures, must be taken seriously. But, while communications systems and information flows become increasingly central components of social, economic and political activity at all levels, media education, or media literacy as it is often called, remains fairly marginal. Fortunately, that marginality is changing. Parents, community, educators, religious organizations, special interest groups and others are taking on the task of media literacy.
Well-known communications scholar Todd Gitlin writes, "Television bears special watching. It needs criticism and understanding which cuts beneath annoyance or apologia. To be seen properly, it has to be seen as the play where force fields interact — economic imperatives, cultural traditions and political impositions". Some of the reasons for the urgency of this task are:
1. The high rate of media consumption and the saturation of our society by the media. The average American household has the television on more than seven and a half hours a day. The average urban dweller is exposed to more than 1500 ads a DAY! Just like the air and water around us, and about which we are increasingly concerned, media education takes our media environment seriously.
2. The media's influence on shaping the perceptions, beliefs and attitudes. While research disagrees on the extent and type of influence, it is unquestionable that mass media, particularly television, exert a significant impact on the way we understand, interpret and act on our world. By helping us understand those influences, media education can delink us from our dependencies on them.
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3. The growth in media industries and the importance of information in our society. This refers not only to the degree to which information processing and information services are at the core of the nation's productivity, but also the degree to which media and information industries are increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer corporate giants. Media education can help teachers and students understand who owns and controls media and information, and to challenge the great inequalities which exist between the manufacturers of information and the consumers.
4. The importance of media in our central democratic processes. Elections have become media events and photo-opportunities. Personalities are packaged over issues. Media education is an essential if citizens are to make rational decisions, become effective change agents and have an active involvement in their system of governance.
5. The increasing importance of visual communication and information. While schools continue to be dominated by print, our lives are increasingly dominated by visual images, from the nightly news to MTV. Learning how to "read" the meanings of these images is a necessary adjunct to print literacy.
Knowing that media are important in our lives - and that educators must address these technologies and their impact - doesn't help teachers, parents or communities figure out HOW to approach this task. Several media scholars have suggested different approaches and complementary pedagogies. Len Masterman, suggests one approach: to define core concepts; to analyze economic, political, technological and cultural determinants of media production; to explore the nature of media's symbolic world and rhetoric; and to apply theoretical models to the study of rhetoric, ideology and audience.
The Center for Media Literacy (Los Angeles, California), which for years has been publishing the excellent magazine, Media&Values has recently taken on the formidable task of developing a U.S. model for media literacy using a four-step method of Awareness - Analysis - Reflection - Action.
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Awareness is the exploration step. Participants explore a theme, discovering points of tension between personal values and mass media. A parent group studying video violence might compare notes on the various ways their children of different ages respond to different types of violent images.
Analysis is the process of searching for political, economic, social, cultural and personal context in which to think about the theme. Participants might read an article that explains how advertising segments the public into audience "targets," watch a video that documents how the nightly news is gathered and edited or look for patterns in the way males and females are depicted in magazine ads.
Reflection addresses the question "So what?" The goal is identification of what's right or wrong in light of one's personal values, imagining what ought to be. Participants might become headline editors, rewriting headlines to reflect the point of view of women or minorities rather than the typical white or male perspective.
Action is something done as a result of the first three steps. This may range from simply learning to "talk back" while watching television to becoming involved in a citizen review of local cable channel.
New approaches are required when teaching media literacy. It is as important for teachers as for students to become aware of the media's power and influence; to analyze and reflect on the profound political and personal issues associated with media consumption; and to become "active audiences" engaged in creating a fair and balanced media environment.
(from Media&Values)
A Socratic Approach
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A Socratic approach offers a strategy for detecting illogical assumptions, beliefs, and values that are embedded in media presentations. Adapted from a method of inquiry developed by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, this approach enables individuals to identify the implicit suppositions behind the messages in many media presentations.
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The Socratic method of inquiry consists of the following steps:
1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense.
2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true.
3. If an exception is found, the definition must be false or at least imprecise.
4. The initial statement must be nuanced to take the exception into account.
5. If one subsequently finds exceptions to the improved statements, the process should be repeated. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a think lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out when something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
6. The product of thought is superior to the product of intuition.
Adapting the Socratic approach to the analysis of media programming provides a strategy for identifying inconsistent and illogical suppositions in the presentation. These ideas frequently go unchallenged because they are characterized by their naturalness s- that this is the way that it is supposed to be. Media programs often present a preferred reading in which the audience sees the world from the point of view of the main characters and, consequently, assume the role, perspective, and orientation of the primary figures. Because the perspective adopted by the protagonists is presented as natural and normal, the values and beliefs that make up the world view of the presentation go unquestioned. However, the Socratic method of inquiry can bring these illogical suppositions to light.
(A. Silverblatt)
I’М A HORRIBLE SUBVERSIVE
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Terry Deary is probably the most influential historian in Britain today. His Horrible Histories — 35 books in the past nine years — have sold more than 6m copies, with some making it onto bestseller lists and leading the lending charts in children’s libraries.
Not surprisingly, these jolly paperbacks with their alliterative titles (The Rotten Romans, The Terrible Tudors, The Vile Victorians, The Frightful First World War), which deliver historical facts through cartoons, jokes, drawings and a wealth of information on the lavatorial customs of the period, are now widely used by teachers for history lessons.
You would assume that Deary, himself a former drama teacher from Sunderland, would be thrilled. He is not. In fact, he’s not a great fan of schools at all. “Schools teach facts and skills because they are testable,” he declares.
“They will say, ‘William conquered England in 1066’, and then ask, ‘When did William conquer England?’ You say ‘1066’ and get a tick. They don’t ask, ‘How would you have felt if a strange culture invaded your land?”
“They don’t test our understanding of peoples and our response to traumatic situations.
“With the introduction of the national curriculum, league tables and tests at key stages we are back to when I was at school and sat the 11-plus. Once again, schools are geared towards tests, not just in history, in all subjects.”
Education should be about understanding the world, not cramming children with facts, insists Deary. His answer, in his books, is to be “seriously subversive. I challenge everything the national curriculum forces down our throats”.
Recently, he says, schools have been told they “should teach the heroes of the British Empire”, but he insists “there are no heroes. Every man and woman has a human side”. So, in the Horrible Histories, Henry VIII is presented as a “psycho sadist” comparable to Hitler; Elizabeth I had violent temper tantrums; Victoria was extremely fat; and her “vile son” Edward VII once hunted a deer from Harrow to Paddington station.
He didn’t immediately realise that his books could be vehicles for his “subversive” message. Initially, they were simply supposed to be funny. A way to get children, especially hard-to-reach boys, to derive pleasure from books by including lots of gruesome information about executions and the nasty details of everyday life the curriculum never manages to get round to, enlivened with the kind of schoolboy jokes that were already a bit corny when Henry VIII was in short trousers.
Deary had been writing children’s books for years in the long school holidays. Then his publisher asked him to do The Big Fat Father Christmas Joke Book.
“After I’d done that, I said why not a history joke book? You know, ‘Where do the French buy their guillotines? In a chopping centre’, with a few foul facts thrown in for good measure. But when I started researching the foul facts I found they were interesting and truly educational.
“One of my drama lecturers once said the most important thing is to explore why people behave as they do. When we’ve solved that, we’ve cracked it, but schools are ignorant of that question.
“I went to Bosworth Field last week and stood where Richard stood. The question for me was to look at the scene — England — and ask — is this worth dying for? It was, and he did. It’s up to each of us to challenge ourselves.”
The books also encourage readers to challenge their teachers with lists of questions — especially about the lives of children, a focus of all the titles.
Задания :
1. Каким образом вы передадите на русский язык имена собственные:
Terry Deary, Horrible Histories, William, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Edward VII, Harrow, Paddington, Bosworth Field?
2. Какие лексические соответствия вы используете для перевода следующих слов - to gear, to cram, subversive, corny, to crack, to challenge?
3. Каким образом вы передадите на русский язык словосочетания lavatorial customs, strange culture, forces down our throats, hard-to-reach boys, chopping centre, foul facts?
4. В следующих названиях книг использован прием аллитерации. Используйте данный прием при переводе: The Rotten Romans, The Terrible Tudors, The Vile Victorians, The Frightful First World War.
5. В переводе каких предложений следует использовать приемы членения и объединения?
6. Переведите письменно данный текст.
YOU MAY BE ABLE TO TELL A NATION BY ITS ADVERTS - BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR CHURCH?
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1 “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements,” remarked the writer Norman Douglas. Given the brisk trade that Tesco and B&Q now do on Sundays, and the empty pews in our churches, he must be right. But how effective can advertising be in getting across the Christian message to a largely agnostic and sceptical public?
2 Our society is saturated by advertising today. Radio, TV, newspapers, billboards, football jerseys, bus shelters, phone boxes, all carry messages and images to try to persuade us to buy, think or talk about this or that.
3 Church leaders are faced with two facts: you can’t save souls in an empty church, and the battle for hearts and minds is being plotted by the creatives in adland.
4 Every September for the past six years posters for Alpha, which uses a group meal and a talk to introduce people to Christianity, have been appearing in towns and cities across the country. This year, 1,500 billboards will carry the message: “The Alpha Course. An Opportunity to Explore the Meaning of Life.” Alongside it is an image of a man struggling with a giant question mark. More than 7,000 churches have registered to hold Alpha courses.
5 “The reason we do it is to raise the profile of Alpha courses. We’re not advertising church. The courses are designed for people who don’t go to church,” says Mark Elsdon-Dew, the communications director of Alpha International.
6 Many churches of different denominations get together in towns and cities to do a leaflet campaign together. The billboards, backs of buses and all that are what the media pick up on. But there are thousands of people up and down the country who display posters in their homes, offices, sports clubs and churches.
7 Last month a Leicester Christadelphian church, The Ecclesia, launched an advertising campaign to promote The Bible Exhibition, which opened at Leicester Guildhall last Monday. Posters with the slogan “It’s now for the good news” will be displayed on five billboards and on the sides of buses in the city. To back this up, 15,000 leaflets will also be distributed.
8 “The whole purpose of the campaign is to get people to read the Bible for themselves. We’re saying that there’s a lot of bad news in the world and the Bible is God’s good news. Jesus said that we should go out to the whole world and preach the Gospel to all people. And we believe that it is our obligation to do this,” explains Phil Mallinder, secretary of the preaching committee.
9 “We’ve used buses before, but not billboards. In the past we’ve concentrated on local newspapers, such as the Leicester Mercury. 'We felt that billboards would be a good way of advertising because you can’t get away from them. It will be difficult to judge the effectiveness of the adverts. But we are planning to conduct a survey of religious attitudes and we will have a question asking people if they have seen the posters.” Stevie Spring, chief executive of Clear Channel UK, the country’s leading outdoor advertising company, said, “We take advertisements mainly from evangelical churches. What they are trying to do is a product taster. Most of the adverts are about coming for a meeting or a taster. Alpha is an example. There are very few examples where the Church uses a simple message to lapsed users”.
10 “Outdoor adverts can be targeted. Everyone sees them. They can’t be tuned out or turned off. A lot can be done by tapping into a guilt theme to get people back to church. Posters are about sight bites. The Bible and all the great religions have catch phrases, and they work well on posters.” The Churches’ Advertising Network, which is run largely by Anglican clergy but operates independently of the Churches, has a reputation for producing imaginative, and sometimes controversial, posters. It was responsible for a 1999 poster depicting the Last Supper as a boardroom meeting of multinational companies, with Judas representing Microsoft, and the Virgin Mary having a “Bad Hair Day” and Jesus as the Communist revolutionary Che Guevara.
11 Advertising might work for Alpha, by getting people talking about the course, but it is questionable how effective campaigns such as those run by the Churches Advertising Network and the rather cheeky religious order are. The Committee of Advertising Practice, the industry body that writes the rules for non-broadcast advertising, has recently advised marketers to be careful not to offend religious sensitivities. The reason for this is that, while the Churches abandon or subvert religious symbols and ideas, ironically, the advertising industry is increasingly borrowing them to sell everything from jeans to beer. If we agree with Norman Douglas, then perhaps there is a message for church leaders to ponder.
Примечания:
Tesco - supermarket chain
B&Q - a chain selling home products
Задания:
1. Ответьте на вопросы по тексту:
1. What is the aim of different advertisements?
2. What is Alpha?
3. What is the whole purpose of the leaflet campaign?
4. Why are billboards considered to be a good way of advertising?
5. What does the advertising industry increasingly borrow from the Churches?
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