Research Article
Deconstructing Power: Ideologies, Webs of Hyper-reality and Metanarratives in Hamid’s The Spinner’s Tale
Qasim Ali Kharal*
,
Shanza Dilawar
Issue:
Volume 10, Issue 4, December 2025
Pages:
128-136
Received:
28 May 2025
Accepted:
5 October 2025
Published:
30 October 2025
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20251004.11
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Abstract: This research explores the ideologies that help individuals gain power and control over people through the analysis of Omer Shahid Hamid’s The Spinner’s Tale. Main characters in the novel, like Ausi and Omer, have used religious ideology to empower and attain their personal objectives. Political, religious, and social ideologies are narratives simulated through media and feigns to extend political power. This qualitative study tries to bridge the social and religious ideologies through a theoretical framework of hyper-reality and concept of metanarrative. The intertwined postmodern theorists included Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson to help reveal the construction of dominant/totalizing metanarratives. This study tries to fill the gap through exploring post-9/11 socio-political anxieties bridging contemporary Pakistani literary criticism. The idea mirrors local narratives, broadening global discourses of terrorism intervened through hyper-real constructs of media and state power. The article develops strong argument to mark digital saturation, surveillance, and ideological fragmentation in present era disclosing Pakistan struggling with identity, belonging, and resistance through narrative of The Spinner’s Tale. The findings indicate towards an intentional vagueness of the novel's inference to highlight the necessity to inquire the narratives that are popular in postcolonial societies through the lens of a postmodern theoretical framework.
Abstract: This research explores the ideologies that help individuals gain power and control over people through the analysis of Omer Shahid Hamid’s The Spinner’s Tale. Main characters in the novel, like Ausi and Omer, have used religious ideology to empower and attain their personal objectives. Political, religious, and social ideologies are narratives simu...
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Research Article
A Case Study of Preferential Changes in the Revision of English-to-Chinese Translation
Xiean Huang*,
Caixi Liu
Issue:
Volume 10, Issue 4, December 2025
Pages:
137-145
Received:
28 September 2025
Accepted:
13 October 2025
Published:
30 October 2025
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20251004.12
Downloads:
Views:
Abstract: Preferential changes in revision are a phenomenon commonly observed in other-revision contexts (one translator revises another translator’s work). Revisers tend to over-revise the translations rendered by others even though the translations are accurate and adequate enough. Despite the ongoing debate within translation studies on preferential changes for years, detailed case studies of that phenomenon in the scenario of English-to-Chinese translation remain scarce. The current study selects an English text excerpted from a think tank handbook originally published in the United States and collects its unrevised Chinese translation alongside 12 versions of revision conducted independently by 8 undergraduates with different academic backgrounds, 2 postgraduate translation students, 1 doctoral translation student, and their advisor. All the 12 revisers are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. This study counts the number of changes made by revisers, analyzes and assesses which changes are necessary and which are preferential (unnecessary), and categorizes and quantifies those preferential changes following the classification proposed by Jean Nitzke and Anne-Kathrin Gros in their research on English-to-German translation. Though adopting this classification, this study adapts it slightly so that it can better suit the scenario of English-to-Chinese translation. The research result reveals that the rate of preferential changes declines notably with the revisers’ advancement in academic levels and improvement in specialized training of translation and revision. This study then explores the reasons behind the phenomenon of preferential changes based on the case study. Besides the linguistic reasons and the revisers’ translation competence, sociological reasons are also considered. Some revisers may prefer to actively look for mistakes in the target text in order to demonstrate that they’ve taken the task seriously and performed their duty well, even though the target text does not need so many changes. Regarding future research, a case study of preferential changes in the post-editing of machine translation, or MTPE, will be conducted as a follow-up. With the rapid development and wide application of artificial intelligence-empowered large language models, it is more and more common to post-edit a machine translation rather than translate a script manually from scratch. Post-editing, like revision, is still conducted by humans, at least in the present and for the several years to come.
Abstract: Preferential changes in revision are a phenomenon commonly observed in other-revision contexts (one translator revises another translator’s work). Revisers tend to over-revise the translations rendered by others even though the translations are accurate and adequate enough. Despite the ongoing debate within translation studies on preferential chang...
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