TRANS Nr. 16: Anca Irinel Teleoacă ("Lower Danube" University, Galati, Romania): Report: Re-Shaping Eastern Communities’ Patterns through the European Union Context

The section gathered Romanian representatives in the various language research fields of Pragmatics, Semantics, Lexicology, Rhetoric and Functional Stylistics, Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Translation Theory and Practice, Sociolinguistics, and last but not least, Theory of Literature. The main topic was re-shaping Eastern communities’ patterns and, therefore, renewal of and reconsideration about the Romanian Identity - starting from 1989 - through the European Union context and the forthcoming European Integration.

As a result, the aim of the section is to outline the major idea that there is a strong tendency to re-shape socio-cultural democratic values by means of re-inventing or giving birth to new discourse clues and patterns which are already in use by new generations of people, who are able to, firstly, understand, then to cope with and, finally, to cooperate harmoniously with the EU values. It is already a fact that the European Union shares undiscriminating values whether social, economic, political or educational. At the same time, it is also of high priority that these vales be assessed by and spread over the other important socio-cultural European spaces mostly influencing the way people conduct their own lives in their communities and also the behavioral patterns concerning main principles, value-judgments and traditions. Therefore, Eastern peoples as main ‘Actors of Change’ have had to be aware of a new type of communicative discourse that has undergone profound changes that occurred under the aegis of EU in the past decades. The spread and extensive use of new linguistic formulations such as: multi-level systems, one to many, many to many relations, harmonization, integration, globalization and localization, input-output legitimacy, discourse clues to transparency, partnerships and negotiation, access to information, open the path to the reconstruction of a new value system much closer to the idea of ‘closing the gaps’ at each and every level of language and to no longer provoking manipulative clusters and other ‘disturbances’ within both the discourse utterances and the old versus new communication channels.

A Past-Future Synopsis of Romania in Europe, - as presented in Teleoacă’s ("Lower Danube" University of Galaţi, Romania) paper entitled Foreign Languages in Romania. Past and Present - , has also to be taken into consideration, concerning the discourse because of two important reasons: the climate change, on the one hand, and the new realities of a Union, on the other. Similarly, the subscription of same democratic values between European countries, voluntarily or not, attracts and provokes discourse changes that need to be highlighted whatever the discourse may be: political, economic, law, educational and, last but not least, the ordinary one, be it formal or not. Therefore, the domains investigated in the present section belong to the specialized fields of: Economics (Alina Ganea, Anca Irinel Teleoacă - Galaţi), Advertising (Ela Vîlceanu - Craiova and Aura Cibian - Alba Iulia), Socio-Politics (Carmen Maftei and Floriana Popescu - Galaţi), Education (Gabriel Istode, - Galaţi)), all type of media (Crina Herţeg, Aura Cibian - Alba Iulia), Information Technology (Alina Ganea, Anca Irinel Teleoacă), Literature (Valerica Sporiş -Sibiu , Gabriela Chiciudean - Alba Iulia), etc.

The first presenter, Alina Ganea ("Lower Danube" University of Galaţi), deals with the idea of the concept of globalization under the European umbrella. In her paper, In Search of a Unique European Language, she brings logic and evidence into the dichotomy of globalization versus localization and how the former can be framed as a promise through collaboration, fusion, free exchange of ideas, fertile transculturations, on the one hand, and on the other, she sustains the fact that globalization may be seen as a threat due to cultural and economic imperialism, loss of cultural distinctiveness, cultural uniformity, etc. More than that, she embraces the idea of how English, for instance, as a possible new lingua franca, may affect local cultures and their distinctiveness when striving too hard for becoming citizens of the European Space.

On the level of a new, patterned discourse, there is also the urge to identify and underline new significances of ‘cultural space’ within the general context of shared values and the teaching-learning process/context of making choices, having options, and, moreover, negotiating freely on them. For instance, Gabriel Istode ("Lower Danube" University of Gala ţ i), in Die linguistischen Universalia - linguistische Eurobrücke, approaches the concept of localization within different formative linguistic matrices such as Slavic, Anglophone, Francophone, etc., and underlines the idea of how difficult it is for a member of Far-Eastern cultures to adapt to Western languages. He also brings psycho-systemic evidence about taking into consideration both the options and limitations that the Beherrscher (maître de langue) of the Romanian language has within such a complex linguistic matrix as the European one, when opposed to his own geo-physiological matrix. The conclusion drawn is that the assimilation of a second or a third language, therefore a different language from the one which generates the original psycho-system is actually one of the key-elements which lead to the establishment of the structure and functioning of the respective linguistic psycho-system, consequently, this need be the main concern of the European linguists because here, within this psycho-systematic universe, the language researchers can find the answers to more questions ever imagined.

In the same way, Gina Necula in her Linguistic Patterns as Means of Persuasion ("Lower Danube" University of Galaţi) writes about the discourse taxonomy (viz., argumentative / persuasive-type ("as blind as a bat"), evaluative / critical type ("to be or not to be"), authoritative / confident-type ("An apple a day keeps he doctor away!"), equivocal / ambiguous-type ("to be or not to be"), etc.) and exemplifies with preset and condensed formulas that communicate universal wisdom whose occurrence in the discourse confers argumentative authority ("alb ca zăpada" for "white as snow" or the French, "blanc comme neige"). She concludes that effective persuasiveness is elicited by various linguistic variables that skillful communicators use as a tool to make the audience conform to their ideas, on the one hand, and to prove his own superiority when delivering a speech, on the other (linguistic forms interact with/at the communicators’ psychological level). Not too different to the methods and the approach used from the previous speaker is Aura Cibian’s paper, Le Discours Publicitaire - De L’Information de la Séduction, which continues in French to talk pragmatically about the ‘globalized’ media as a very powerful socio-political tool in manipulating masses of people obviously because it seduces them through the power of perfectly well-designed discourses.

The next presenter, Titela Vî lceanu (University of Craiova), shows in her paper, Re-Shaping Identity in the Translation of Advertisements, that both the Romanian "maîtres de langue" and the mother tongue are greatly but, fortunately not so often, conceptually influenced by English in the domain of advertising through borrowing, almost completely, both the European and the American products (> the West), brands and way of thinking towards the customer’s fully satisfaction. Nevertheless, the target language finds ‘peaceful’ ways to express patterns and cultural specific idioms from the source languages into the target language through contextualization (adaptation and paraphrase).

Due to the 20 th century European contextualization and integration, myths, legends, festivals and traditions, their heroes and their inventors/writers have become not only travelers across borders but they also intermingle various specific concepts that prove to work perfectly together. Consequently, Eastern culture started to move towards Western civilization and vice versa. This is illustrated in Considerations regarding the Status of Writer by Gabriela Chiciudean (The "1^st December" University of Alba Iulia) who makes the distinction between two cultures, Eastern (by approaching Liviu Rebreanu’s personal life) and Western (referring to Virginia Woolf and her socio-professional status), and then, she proves to be more inquisitive about the status of writer: profession or hobby in two differently temporal dimensions, the 19 th and the 20 th centuries - that obviously and undoubtedly hold opposing views in what Europe used to symbolize once (the Old Continent) and what it stands for nowadays (the Modern(1)/Redesigned(2)/Renewed(3) Continent).

Finally, Crina Herţeg (Analysis and Translation Approach to Specialised Language - The "1 st December" University of Alba Iulia) , Anca Irinel Teleoac ă and Alina Ganea’s papers have a mutual goal in attempting to bring evidence for the linguistic means that highly influenced the mother-tongue in the past decades due to recently emerged referents or concepts mainly belonging to the Western economic ‘conquest’ of Eastern markets and the Computer Science domain. Similarly, the cause and effect relationships of both French and English penetration in the target language are thoroughly explained.

On the other hand, Valerica Sporiş ("Lucian Blaga" University, Sibiu) attacks on the Functional Stylistics approach to demonstrate - in her paper, L’analyse stylistique: méthode ou technique de recherche du texte? - the fact that the stylistic analysis of any kind of text no longer represents a method, but it is also a technique in investigating and interpreting the respective text.

Last but not least, Carmen Maftei and Floriana Popescu’s ("Lower Danube" University of Galaţi) paper entitled Eponyms in Politics provides a lexical interpretation of eponyms identified in the recent European policies and not only. Their main concern was to provide a framework fit for the lexical interpretation and illustration of eponymy, investigating all types of eponyms within the contemporary political discourse. The contemporary terminology has undergone transformations in various specialized fields; therefore, new concepts have been introduced thus contributing to the enrichment of the vocabulary.

Romanian has changed her status of being a Francophone country into an Anglophone one under the huge economic revolution that continues to cross the European borders from the West to the East. More than that, it also attempts to change her status from a "non-European country" - as we are now reading on the displays of the international airports - into becoming a "European one".

Re-shaping patterns also means the global eradication and elimination of anything could ever possibly remind us of the age of communism: the dichotomy Eastern versus Western countries has almost vanished and got re-invented under the European Union context: European versus non-European borders.

We no longer live in the Machiavelli times of "divide et impera" but we are witnessing and experiencing the uniformity and diversity at the same time; in other words, "una et impera" has become the main economic strategy for the Third Millenium under the European concept of Integration. The first instrument to perform this task was the introduction of the Euro coin (exempt from UK and the countries that do not belong to the European Community), and the second instrument seems to be the English language.

The exaggerate use of the English words by the native speakers of Romanian does not block the development of the TL; on the contrary, it helps of understanding other people behavioural, cultural, socio-economic living standards. TL and its users will reach a final point in finding the most appropriate equivalents but not until the SL items are fully understood and experienced.

To do so, teachers of English as a second language have to explain their students the reasons they are using so much English in their TL; because if the reasons and motivations are comprehended, then the linguistic instruments used will finally be handled and the linguistic hybrids and other weird expressions will soon vanish from our TC.

(3) The whole continent tends to become a huge economic and political power under the Euro monetary policy.

For quotation purposes:
Anca Irinel Teleoacă ("Lower Danube" University, Galati, Romania): Re-Shaping Eastern Communities’ Patterns through the European Union Context. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 16/2005. WWW: ../../../index.htmtrans/16Nr/14_1/teleoaca_bericht16.htm