Tag: international professional communication

CFP Designing Professional Communication Across Cultures

CFP Designing Professional Communication Across Cultures
Special issue of connexions: international professional communication journal

In the last thirty years, two trends have transformed the world of professional communication. On one hand, a global economy has increasingly placed professional communicators in multilingual and multicultural work environments. In such environments, disciplinary borders are blurred, markets are integrated, and ideas are shared across individuals and organizations. On the other hand, advances in technology have revolutionized the ways communication products are designed, shared, and assessed. Professional communicators must thus reach and serve a diverse population of stakeholders.

They do so with multimodal forms of communication that integrate both text, visuals, and audience interactions. Design no longer means “a picture is worth a thousand words.” It is now impacted by a holistic methodology often known as “design thinking.” Design thinking encompasses the entire process of creating professional communication products and services, including websites, social media campaigns, technical documentation, and information-driven user interfaces. Neumeier (2009) wrote that design “has been waiting patiently in the wings for nearly a century, having been relegated to supporting roles and stand-in parts” (p.18). Design thinking is now important to such disparate activities as branding, innovation, and cultivating optimal user experiences. As Vogel (2009) pointed out: “Only one company in a market can be the cheapest; the rest need design” (p.8).

In this way, the practice of designing across cultures has been brought to the forefront of professional communication in order to engage stakeholders in a globalized, multicultural marketplace. From a business perspective, communicators use design thinking to discover user goals, strategize content, structure teams, and create and evaluate prototypes. Design helps distinguish brands and increase value for enterprises. Design can also help bridge linguistic and breaks language and cultural barriers, however. It can create beneficial solutions for users from minoritized, underrepresented, and marginalized populations. Good design is thus culturally-sensitive as it must adapt to and respect cultural groups being served.

This special issue of connexions: international professional communication journal seeks to understand, articulate, and evaluate the role of design in professional communication across cultures. It aims to bring together scholars and practitioners who engage in design activities in a cross-cultural or multi-cultural context. Here culture is broadly defined. We seek articles related to nationality, race, ethnicity, age, gender, disability/accessibility, sexual orientation, as well as any other cultural/professional identities.

Suggested topic areas include, but are not limited to:
Design thinking in professional communication projects
Challenges in designing for multi-national and multi-cultural audiences
Affordances for specific genres of information products within specific cultures
The design, writing, and strategy of documentation
New approaches to particular sets of audiences and markets
Design pedagogy, curricula, training, and organizational development
Design project management and team work
Design in internationally-distributed work environments
Information design and its relationship to culture
The relationship between design, users, and professional communication

References
Neumeier, M. (2009). The designful company. In T. Lockwood (Ed.), Design thinking: Integrating innovation, customer experience, and brand value (pp. 15-22). New York, NY: Allworth.
Vogel, C. M. (2009). Notes on the evolution of design thinking: A work in progress. In T. Lockwood (Ed.), Design thinking: Integrating innovation, customer experience, and brand value (pp. 3-14). New York, NY: Allworth.

Schedule
Submission deadline for manuscript abstracts: March 15th, 2016
Notification of acceptance: June 30th, 2016
Submission deadline for full manuscripts: September 30th, 2016
Expected date of publication: December 30th, 2016

Submission Procedures
Submit 500-word abstracts for original research articles, review articles, and teaching cases; or 250-word abstracts for focused commentary and industry perspectives.
Prepare a cover page for your abstract with 1.5 line spacing and Georgia, 12-point font.
Save the cover page and abstract in doc, docx, or rtf format.
Include in your cover page author(s) names, institutional affiliations, email addresses, and whether you are submitting a research article, a review article, a teaching case, a focused commentary, or an industry perspective.
Submit your abstract via email to Quan Zhou and Guiseppe Getto.

Upon acceptance of your proposal, you will be invited to submit a full-length manuscript. All manuscripts that meet the journal’s standards and requirements will be, without exception, submitted to double-blind peer review.

Abstracts To Be Developed Into
Original research articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words
Review articles of 3,000 to 5,000 words
Teaching cases of 3,000 to 5,000 words
Focused commentary and industry perspectives articles of 500 to 3,000 words

Contact information
Quan Zhou
Metropolitan State University, MN
Guiseppe Getto
East Carolina University

CFP Translation and International Professional Communication

CFP Special issue of Connexions
Translation and International Professional Communication: Building Bridges and Strengthening Skills

Guest editors:
Bruce Maylath (USA)
Ricardo Muñoz Martín (Spain)
Marta Pacheco Pinto (Portugal)

Deadline for submissions: April 10, 2015. See the complete call for papers for additional details.

The globalization and the fast mobility of today’s markets—aiming to serve as many heterogeneous settings and audiences as possible—have posited a growing need for high quality products and optimal performance in nearly all areas of everyday life. Specialists in communication play an important, albeit often hidden, role in these processes. Translators and other international professional communicators operate as mediators to facilitate understanding across global, international, national and local contexts through diverse communication channels. Translating today often involves several agents with different roles, responsibilities and skills. This entails creative work, various innovative procedures, and collaborative networks in highly technological, distributed environments. All these agents can be seen as text producers with an increasing expertise in the tools and skills of their trades to find, manage, process, and adapt information to target audiences.

Despite disperse attempts at acknowledging the importance of approaching professional communication as translation or as involving translation-related skills, translation often remains invisible both in the literature and in the training of (international) professional communicators. The extant literature in Communication Studies that actually addresses translation usually tends to emphasize, and concentrate on, localization issues, and it often draws from functional approaches to translation as production of a communicative message or instrument.

In Translation Studies, on the other hand, there is an increasing awareness of the need to tend bridges to Communication Studies in research. However, more dialogue seems necessary to fully grasp the implications and commonalities in all areas of multilingual professional communication, not the least that they are usually ascribed peripheral roles in business, technical, and scientific endeavors.

The emerging figure of the multitasked professional communicator has brought translation as part of the document production process to a different level of discussion. It is drawing increasing attention to translators’ profiles and training as competent communicators and vice versa, thus showing that the role translation plays in international professional communication, and the role of international professional communication in translator training cannot be downplayed. This issue of the connexions journal seeks to build bridges of cross-disciplinary understanding between international professional communication scholars and practitioners and translation scholars and practitioners. It aims to foster debate around the role of translation as a special kind of international professional communication and also as an integral part of other (international) professional communication instances.

CFP Connexions Journal

connexions • international professional communication journal | revista de comunicação profissional internacional places great emphasis on Special Issues as a unique means of promoting high-quality research in thematic areas related to international professional communication.

The journal is accepting proposals from Guest Editors for:
*Special Issue 2(2): December 2013
*Special Issue 3(2): December 2014
*Special Issue 4(1): June 2015
*Special Issue 4(2): December 2015
Issue 3(1): June 2014 will be composed of regular submissions.

Please send your proposals for Special Issues to Rosário Durão at   editor@connexionsjournal.org.

This page provides guidelines to help you organize proposals for Special Issues.

General requirements
*Special Issues are organized by a minimum of 2, and a maximum of 3 Guest Editors.
*Guest Editors are recognized experts in the area they are proposing for the Special Issue.
*Guest Editors are from different institutions and, preferably, countries.
*Special Issues reflect the international aims and scope of the journal. Therefore, Special Issues include a maximum of 3 papers from a particular country. Normally, the journal publishes 5 to 7 papers per issue.