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This paper aims to understand the elements of bridging practices enacted by Asian immigrant consumers and exploring how these practices constitute reverse acculturation within immigrant-receiving Western cultures.

A practice theoretical perspective was deployed in concert with a hermeneutic analysis of two-part depth interviews with 26 Southeast Asian immigrants in New Zealand. Multi-modal methods and open narrative reflexivity were deployed to improve depth and trustworthiness.

Participant narratives revealed three intertwined elements of bridging practices: articulations (involving sayings and meanings), performances (involving embodied social activities and material artefacts) and contestations (involving tensions and anxieties). Bridging practices create shared social spaces and facilitate the intensification of intercultural translation.

Bridging practices provide a partial view of wider “circuits of practice” (Magaudda, 2011) which cumulatively constitute reverse acculturation. Future research is needed to show how bridging practices serve as resources for transforming the consumption practices of local consumers in Western cultures.

This study advances consumer acculturation theory in three ways. First, this study identifies a key practice of intercultural translation between Asian and Western consumer cultures. In particular, this study shows that intercultural translation occurs not only through ethnic economies but also in a diverse range of private and public sites. Second, in addition to local consumers’ practices (Sobh et al., 2012), this study highlights the role of immigrant consumers’ practices in reverse acculturation, thereby providing empirical evidence for Luedicke’s (2011) conceptual model of intercultural adaptation. Third, in addition to the influence of acculturating agents on immigrant consumers (Askegaard et al., 2005; Peñaloza, 1994), this study demonstrates how immigrant consumers themselves can act as acculturating agents.

This study aims to delve into the interplay between didactic audiovisual translation (DAT) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL), exploring their combined impact on the development of intercultural competence (IC) among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL).

Using a quasi-experimental approach with a quantitative research design, the study analyses the outcomes of a questionnaire answered by 147 students across 15 language centres in Spanish Universities. These participants actively engaged in completing the lesson plans of the Traducción audiovisual como recurso didáctico en el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras project, a Spanish-Government funded research initiative aimed at assessing the effects of DAT on language learning.

The current study confirms the reliability of the instrument developed to measure students’ perceived improvement. Beyond validating the research tool, the findings of the current study confirm the significant improvement in intercultural learning achieved through DAT, effectively enhancing students’ motivation to engage in language learning.

The current research solely examines students enrolled in higher education language centres. This paper closes with a CALL for additional research, including participants from other educational stages, such as primary or secondary education. In the broader context of CALL research, this study serves as a valuable contribution by exploring the potential of DAT in fostering IC in EFL settings.

This research confirms the potential of DAT and CALL to promote students’ learning process, as the combination of these approaches not only yields linguistic benefits but also intercultural learning.

The establishment of academic voice, authority and identity in international fora, this chapter argues, is both a central challenge and a central benefit of international academic relations. For the presentation (of new ideas, papers, paradigms: the lifeblood of academic interchange) entails the mediation not just of a text but also of persona: both must be ‘translated’ for the ‘foreign’ and host audience; both are changed in the process. As always, that which is found, as well as lost, in translation reveals much about the essential qualities of the ‘original’: here the author's ‘original’ academic voice and identity.

This chapter draws on ethnographic and inter-cultural representational models to explore the proper form of recording and reflecting/reflecting on one particular intercultural academic encounter. It uses explanatory models drawn from Academic Literacies, Sociolinguistics and Translation Studies to try to analyse and understand the process, effect and implications of that encounter. In order to establish that which is performative in academic identity, it gives an evaluative account of what it means to lose, and regain, one's academic voice.

This article seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the methodological approach to studying caregiving in a transnational context by analysing, local caregiver’s lifeworld, informal interpreting/translation and professional communication with foreign retirees.

This project explores the complex and multifaceted meanings of everyday objects through diffractive vignettes to illuminate the communicative entanglements that arise between caregivers and foreign retirees receiving care in Thailand. To identify intra-actions in caregiving, we collected data through informal interviews, observations and various artefacts before combining them in a group of potential communicative relationships by creating a narrative summary of situations.

Communicative relationships in the vignettes are multidimensional, with diverse logics underlying choices, rapport formation and communication effectiveness. This premise also illuminates how caregivers perceive and intra-act with their accommodation strategies, considering trust, comfort and comprehension. Our findings were also discussed with the concept of communication accommodation theory.

As an extension of the post-humanist approach to the diffractive reading of vignettes, this study sees its value in studying agent-related informal translation/interpreting and human-to-human relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of translation equivalence in extant research on translation in accounting: What is the equivalence that is expected of translation, and how is it assumed to come into being? This paper presents a coherent, theoretically informed approach to how different views on equivalence are connected to the objective of international comparability in financial accounting and how related, often-underlying assumptions intertwine in this discussion.

This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach by utilizing equivalence theories from the discipline of translation studies. It canvasses two dichotomy-like approaches – natural versus directional equivalence and formal versus dynamic equivalence – to compose a theoretical framework within which to analyze 25 translation-related papers discussing accounting harmonization published from 1989 to 2018.

This paper presents evidence of theoretical contradictions likely to affect the development of translation research in accounting if they go unrecognized. Moreover, the analysis suggests that these contradictions are likely to originate in the assumptions of mainstream accounting research, which neglect both the constructed nature of equivalence and the socially constructed nature of accounting concepts.

Despite the significance of translation for the objective of international comparability, this paper is the first comprehensive theoretical approach to equivalence in accounting research. It responds to a recognized demand for studying equivalence and its limitations, challenges many of the expectations accounting research places on translation and discusses the possible origins of related assumptions.

This paper aims to check whether the bodily self-perception factor plays any role in (female) migrants’ alleged underuse of health services. Out of the four main reasons identified by scholars, the “cultural specificity” factor is tackled here from an intersectional perspective that envisages gender, migration and totalitarianism.

A survey was conducted on 20 Romanian women living in Spain. Two categories were analysed (body as image and body as discourse) to detect perceptions in consultations in Spain as compared to Romania. The assumption that their perceptions varied between the period prior and subsequent to the fall of the dictatorship was contrasted with the information provided by a sample of 25 Spanish women.

The analysis revealed perceptions of a more relaxed medical relationship for Romanian patients in Spain, hence the possibility that migration (normally stressful) gave them a sense of freedom and empowerment.

The intersectional perspective in health communication is original. This study opens a research avenue in health services’ underuse by migrants.

The purpose of this paper is to familiarize managers with alternative social media applications of cross-cultural training approaches.

This paper provides an overview of the current state of social media-based cross-cultural training and its trajectory.

Social media is increasingly an integral part of contemporary communication. This paper shows how training technologies engaging to the born-digital generation have multiple advantages and unique deployment opportunities for cross-cultural know-how development.

This paper provides a technological reframing of intercultural training that better aligns with the practices of the millennial generation, who are ready to embrace the accoutrements of international business and global networks. Readers will be sensitized to the advantages and disadvantages of new social media for intercultural training and education.

When I began to teach within a Masters of Education (Leadership and Management) program, I questioned my assumed unproblematic nature of the presentation of Western leadership and management theories to students from a diverse range of countries without understanding the diversity. The expectations of International students are also that overseas study is designed to facilitate the transport of Western theory, as ‘the solution’ which makes the indigenous knowledges they bring struggle to appear. Few students seem to question the transferability of Western knowledge to other cultures, yet it may actually be of limited value to the real concerns and issues associated with the leadership of organisations in their home countries. Building on the ideas of Raewyn Connell and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this chapter examines possibilities for research-led pedagogies which support an awareness of the dominance and persistence of northern-centric patterns of global knowledge production, challenging students to question their own expectations of the dominance of Western theory. Through so doing, it makes possible the re-imagining of possibilities for transformation through the emergence of alternatives, where engaging in democratic deliberation about what is gained and lost from adopting various knowledge positions informs a better understanding of human social and organisational experiences. Rather than subscribing to a single, universal and abstract hierarchy among knowledges, which privileges Western theories, cognitive justice favours context dependent knowledges. We can prepare the ground for students thinking about the knowledges they bring, and the importance of unique contextual and cultural factors through Butler's notions of intelligibility and performativity to help students understand that actions are conditioned by what is available within the culture and by what practices are legitimating. Dialogue and interpretation can occur across cultures, at the same time as raising the awareness of reciprocal incompleteness of knowledges.