Tamošiūnienė, Lora

Literature in translation on a world stage is becoming of more and more consequence. The approach to literature as a “unifying”, “worlding” power as defined by Pheng Cheah, is gaining the momentum. On a broadest scale, literature is evolving from translation (Rebeca Walkowitz), a phenomenon whose value should not be judged by external political, economical and similar approaches (Pascale Casanova) and an object whose verbal expression and meaning may not be explained by totally focusing on its linguistic character (multilingual approach). Linguistic value of the work of literature is interpreted as a separate function in the construction of a literary work and its posterior translation (Jeremy Munday). A publication of translation of 6 Japanese poets from English into Lithuanian is a case study to see the function of the above ideas. Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, a Lithuanian poet, essayist, literary and art critic undertook this endevour with the feeling of the lack of “poeticity” in the present haiku and tanka translations from Japanese into Lithuanian.

Francis Bacon’s often-quoted metaphor about books, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested” (Eagleton 1997), is one of the inspirations for this analysis of selected eating-related episodes in books, to be more precise, in two novels. The two excerpts come from contemporary Korean novels. One excerpt is the opening passage from Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin, which describes a villager’s cooking shed. The novel was originally published in Korean in 2009 and translated into English by Chi-Young Kim in 2011. The other is a scene from The Vegetarian by Han Kang, published in 2007 and translated by Deborah Smith in 2015, describing Yeong-ho’s violent meat-feeding by her father. The works are selected for several reasons. First, it is important that for the convenience of a more inclusive understanding, the English translations and not the Korean originals will be focused on. It is necessary to mention that the works have another common denominator: both novels were also translated into Lithuanian by Martynas š iaušiunas Kašinskas. The Vegetarian was published in Lithuanian in 2017, and Please Look After Mom appeared in Lithuanian bookstores in 2019. Their publication in Lithuanian was another strong incentive for the choice of the texts, even stronger than the availability of the texts in English. The Lithuanian literary context offered yet another perspective on these works. It may be argued that the prose works of these Korean authors are the only Korean presence in the kaleidoscope of world and local literature published in Lithuanian recently, and create a possibility to “highlight everything that the exclusive focus on a national literature tends to obscure” (BU 2019). However, the embeddedness of translated fiction in the mechanisms of Lithuanian literature will not be analyzed in this chapter.

Technology driven language teaching and learning is closely related to the need to integrate digital technologies into the language classroom. The technological advances are also evident in the work of the European Commission with the acknowledgement of the use of digital technologies to empower learners and launching numerous EU-funded research projects focused on the ICT use in teaching and learning (European Commission 2020). It becomes evident that improving teacher digital skills is essential as it is also related to the improvement of the digital skills of the learner and the improvement of the teaching and learning process. Teachers’ self-evaluation of their digital prowess is a link towards teachers’ self-identification as professionals. The current study aims to overview the change in the language educators’ perception of their own digital skills in Lithuania. A digital questionnaire designed on Google Forms was employed for collecting and analysing the data in the current study. The research results reveal that educators feel the need to augment their digital skills related to language teaching and learning and see this as part of their professional identity. The study reveals that language educators possessing a higher level of digital skills have the tendency to use more complex digital resources. Most of the respondents rely on textual and audio materials with lesser use of interactive resources which indicates that there is room for augmenting language educator digital skills.