Volume X
Preface
Jaime Cruz Ortiz, Kennesaw State University
(READ HERE)
Globalisierung und Adaptation: Walmarts Unfähigkeit, sich an den deutschen Markt anzupassen
Patrick Burke
From its inception in the 1960s until the 1990s, Walmart seemed unstoppable. Its unprecedented growth secured its place as one of the top retailers in the USA, but soon its profits flatten. The retailing giant searched for new ways to regain its growth by examining new markets. At the time, Germany was considered the third largest retailing market following the United States and Japan and seen as the gateway to eastern Europe. Due to this, Walmart needed to not only enter this market but control it. In 2006 Walmart seemed to have finally met its match. It didn’t come from direct competition such as Target or Kmart, but rather a culture: the German culture. This paper examines why Walmart failed in Germany and more specifically how brand identity and suppliers contributed to its failure. This paper further analyzes how Institutional Theory explains Walmart’s difficulty securing its business ventures in this new market. The three pillars of Institutional Theory—Regulative, Normative, and Cognitive—demonstrate how this American company failed to adapt its strategy to fit into the German culture. This in turn caused the retailing giant to discontinue its operations in Germany, most likely preventing Walmart from entering continental Europe in the future.
Misoginía, “Bad Hombres,” y otros problemas en Trumpslation
Sahara Khan
This paper analyzes three specific instances of Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric throughout his campaign and first year of presidency that are potentially problematic for precise and comprehensible Spanish translation (“Nasty Woman”, “Grab ‘em by the pussy”, and “Bad Hombres”). Through close-readings of twenty translations across over a dozen different online newspapers, this research emphasizes that even well-meaning translations of Trump’s most unprofessional language loses much of is vulgar connotations in the target language due to an inability to convey the full historical context of the English term. The paper ultimately questions how the resulting, mollified translations affect perceptions of Trump’s potency and professionality abroad, and what the resulting national image may imply for U.S. international relations in the near future.
El ascenso de Francisco Vallés en la corte de Felipe II y los avances olvidados de Avicena
Shayann Ramedani
One of the greatest contributions from the Islamic world was the creation of The Canon of Medicine by Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in Persia. The Canon revolutionized medical studies for all of Europe for seven centuries after its publishing in 1025. Many centuries later, in 1558 a Spanish doctor by the name of Francisco Vallés of Covarrubias pioneered the endeavor of Europeanizing medical texts usually ignoring or overwriting the Islamic tradition. These were times of extreme anti-Islamism and anti-Semitism in the peninsula, following the consolidation of the Spanish Catholic Empire after the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of Jews in 1492. I propose that Vallés’s scholarly work, his revisions and commentaries of older medical traditions, aims to discredit Avicenna. I argue that Vallés’s celebrated annotated translation of Aristotle’s Meterolgica IV is a good example of how he attempted to refashioned outdated treatises even when he was aware of Avicenna’s later contributions. In this article, I will explore the two texts to show that the analysis of Valles is basically a repetition of the work previously made by Avicenna. Thus, the Spanish scholar was able to disavow the Islamic contributions to western medicine, and established himself as a founder father of western medicine.
