This research paper aimed to explore and investigate whether the use of animated karaoke in the Japanese language classes has an influence on vocabulary acquisition among Malaysian Japanese language learners. The study was conducted on 100 students learning the Japanese language at the beginner level as an elective subject at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews, and observations. The analytical descriptive result showed that the participants were able to memorize and understand Japanese vocabulary quickly and easily after watching animation consisting of visual graphics combined with text which stimulate their brain. Data from the interviews also showed that the target vocabulary items were pronounced accurately and correctly when learners sang along while watching the animated karaoke. The triangulation of data showed that animated karaoke is a good tool to engage participants in learning the Japanese language while at the same time, having fun and feeling highly motivated to explore the language. The implication of the study suggests that the use of animated karaoke in other foreign language classes will help boost students’ confidence and motivation level.

This study investigates the translation procedures of the translated cultural words on the tourism website and explores whether the cultural representation is author-oriented or reader-oriented. A descriptive qualitative research method was used in this study. Hangzhou tourism website is selected as the case. 160 cultural words were collected and extracted from the website in total. The results indicated that retention, calque, and paraphrase were widely used translation procedures, and cultural representation was author-oriented and tended to preserve the source culture. This study adds new knowledge to the existing Chinese-English online tourism translation studies and enhances the quality of tourism translation.

The steady growth of tourism is increasing the demand for tourism translation. Cultural words (CWs) translation is challenging since they are absent from target cultures. This systematic review examines studies on CWs translation in tourism texts to comprehend the literature and explore future research tendencies. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, researchers did a comprehensive literature review. Twenty-one articles met the inclusion criteria after the protocol-required data selection and screening. The findings reveal that scholars are increasingly concerned with CWs translation in tourism texts. Moreover, all the included articles used varied theories. Most of them focused on applying various taxonomies of translation strategies to compensate for the losses of cultural connotations in cultural words' rendition. Besides, other researchers focused on CWs translation from different perspectives, such as translation quality assessment, Eco-translatology, meaning equivalence, cultural manipulation, and relevance theory.

Studies showed that interpreters might differ in performance when it comes to directionality. Nevertheless, limited research has been undertaken concerning the impact of directionality on student interpreters’ performance in consecutive interpreting (CI), a type of interpreting categorised by the working mode. This study aims to investigate the relationship between directionality and performance by adopting a quantitative approach. Four student interpreters from a Chinese university were selected as samples with a homogeneity sampling method. The participants used Chinese as their first language (L1, or A language) and English as a second language (L2, or B language). Analytic rating scales were combined with propositional analysis to assign scores for different aspects of accuracy and completeness in the product of the CI test by student interpreters. To determine the impact of directionality on performance, paired samples t-test was adopted in the current study by testing the significance of the difference between two mean scores of the CI test. The results showed that directionality affected the performance of student interpreters. Overall, the participants performed better in the into-B direction than in the into-A direction. Thus, it is recommended that teachers pay more attention to training listening comprehension ability of the source text in into-A direction.

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