Asia Institute - Research Publications

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    Fatal flaws? Investigating the effects of machine translation errors on audience reception in the audiovisual context
    Qiu, J ; Pym, A (Taylor & Francis, 2024-03-13)
    This study reports on an experiment where machine translation errors in subtitling are evaluated from the perspective of nine viewers who did not know the source language and seven viewers who were studying the source language. Screen recordings, think-aloud protocols, comprehension tests, and interviews were employed to explore participants’ responses and reactions to erroneous subtitles and to investigate how specific errors impacted comprehension and immersion in the viewing experience. The analysis identifies which errors were most noticed and to what extent those errors affected viewers’ trust in the subtitles. Errors causing significant misunderstanding and distrust are initially considered ‘fatal’, as they may halt viewer immersion and prompt disengagement from the audiovisual product. However, the findings highlight a remarkable tolerance of the uncertainty that results from errors, as viewers filter out misinformation or draw on other sources of information to construe and rectify their interpretations. This tolerance is explained in terms of a general trade-off with the enjoyment of the viewing experience, which varies in accordance with the viewer’s knowledge of the source language.
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    How epistemic anxiety and curiosity link perceived value and intended efforts in the language classroom
    Fraschini, N ; Tao, Y (Cambridge University Press, 2023-03)
    Language learner anxiety—and emotions in general—has constantly attracted academic attention in the second language acquisition (SLA) field for almost 40 years (Plonsky et al., 2022). However, within the context of the foreign language classroom, epistemic emotions remain understudied, despite their demonstrated effects on performance (D'Mello et al., 2014) and learners’ cognitive processes (Muis et al., 2018a). Epistemic emotions are academic emotions that “relate to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities” (Pekrun et al., 2017, p. 1268). Their object focus lies in the generation of knowledge (Vogl et al., 2019a) and therefore are prominent during learning activities in academic settings. Recent research in SLA shows that epistemic emotions play a considerable role in instructed language learning (Fraschini, 2023; Nakamura et al., 2022). This current study analyses how two common epistemic emotions—epistemic anxiety and curiosity—mediate the link between a learner's perceived value and intended effort. Empirical data was collected using a tailor-designed survey administered to learners of Korean as a foreign language enrolled in a hybrid university course. Results show that epistemic anxiety and curiosity are independent of each other and coexist during language learning tasks. Furthermore, both epistemic emotions significantly correlate to a learner's perceived value of language learning, with opposite effects. While learners with a higher perceived value tend to be more curious, they also appear less anxious. These results are further discussed considering teachers’ and learners’ characteristics and in relation to theoretical and pedagogical implications for the language classroom.
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    Equalization through the People’s Republic of China’s Intergovernmental Fiscal System: The Effectiveness of Central and Provincial Transfers
    TAN, X ; TAN, Y (World Scientific Publishing, 2024)
    The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) fiscal system is characterized by very high expenditure decentralization and heavy reliance on transfers to finance public services. The government’s embrace of inclusiveness and equalization as national goals has raised questions about whether transfers can deliver equalization. This paper seeks to answer this question by analyzing newly available fiscal data compiled from government websites. We find the allocation of central transfers remains strongly region based, resulting in high intra-regional inequality among provinces. Poorer provinces also tend to retain more central transfers at their own (provincial) level. Those provinces with greater pretransfer inequality tend to exert greater equalization efforts, but these are not necessarily proportional to their pretransfer inequality. As a result, some localities are left out of the PRC’s countrywide equalization program. These equalization patterns remained highly persistent during the coronavirus disease shock in 2020. Collectively, the findings highlight that the PRC’s complex intergovernmental fiscal system still poses challenges for equalization.
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    COVID-19, Perceived Foreign Interference, and Anti-Chinese Sentiment: Evidence from Concurrent Survey Experiments in Australia and the United States
    Tan, X ; Tao, Y (Taylor and Francis Group, 2024)
    Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in anti-Chinese sentiment emerged as a pressing issue, with debates on how the pandemic exacerbated such sentiments. To explore this intricate relationship, we conducted two survey experiments, incorporating COVID-specific contextual inquiries in Australia and the United States during two phases (8–21 June 2021 and 28 July-12 August 2022). Our findings reveal that individuals’ perceptions of the Chinese diaspora remained unaltered when presented with information regarding the Chinese government’s initial management of COVID-19. However, when exposed to a message suggesting the Chinese government’s influence over overseas Chinese communities, people’s attitudes towards the Chinese diaspora significantly deteriorated. In addition, Australian respondents demonstrated heightened sensitivity to perceived foreign interference from China compared to their American counterparts. Our study underscores the role of suspicions and apprehensions surrounding China-related foreign interference in shaping anti-Chinese sentiment in the Western context.
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    Understanding the racialised and gendered experiences of Asian women working in aged care in Australia
    Winarnita, M ; Leone, C (Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2023)
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    Chronomobility of international students under COVID-19 Australia
    Dhanji, SD ; Ohashi, J ; Song, J (FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2023-12-08)
    This article investigates the chronomobility of international students in Australia going through COVID-19. Existing literature on international students approaches them largely in two manners: a market or victims. Using Shanti Robertson's chronomobility, the study focuses on international students' coping mechanisms and strategies for their next moves. Drawing from 15 in-depth interviews with international students formally enrolled in Australian institutions in Melbourne, the longest lockdown city during the pandemic, the authors find various ways of short-term coping mechanisms through meditation, physical exercises, virtual escapism and counselling. Furthermore, despite pandemic immobility, students presented a high level of resilience in making future decisions for post-pandemic mobilities. We conclude that family support and social networks are key to realise full potentials of international students as skilled migrants and valued members of society. Our manuscript contributes to the field of migration and mobility by enriching Robertson's concept of chrono-mobility and adding the empirical case study from international students in Australia during the latest pandemic in 2020-2021.
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    Language shift and maintenance in the Korean community in Australia
    Shin, S-C ; Jung, SJ (International Journal of Korean Language Education, 2016)
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    Some Interpretations
    Reuter, T (Joshua Nash, 2023)
    Debates on representational bias in the discipline of anthropology have focused on partialities arising from the subjectivity of individual researchers and from specific historical patterns of unequal relations between the societies in which ethnographers live and those they study. There are thus two layers to this debate, with bias operating both at an individual and a collective level. In the first case, biased representations of other ethnic groups and their cultures can arise from the personal subjectivity of individual researchers. In the second, ethnography is compromised as a collective enterprise by unequal historical and contemporary power relations between the societies concerned. An associated legitimisation crisis still lingers because a satisfying solution to the two sides of the subjectivity problem continues to elude us.
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    Imagination, Science and Education: How to liberate ourselves from the prison of rationality
    Reuter, T (Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva, 2023)
    Achieving Human Security For All (HS4A) is a process that depends on our ability to imagine a future state that is different to present conditions, under which HS4A remains elusive. Only a very few eminent thinkers have recognised, however, that imagination is its own unique and important noetic or cognitive function independent of rationality, giving us access to an ontological sphere that otherwise remains closed to us. Meanwhile, for rationalist science philosophy, which has dominated our education systems since the Enlightenment period, imagination has long been understood as nothing but a preoccupation with the unreal, the mythic, the marvellous, the fictive, and fanciful—entertaining perhaps, but of no serious consequence. In this paper, I argue that rationalist modernism, along with a mass education system designed in keeping with this modernist ‘spirit of the times’, has led to our collective imprisonment within the real, the concrete, and robbed us of the capacity to reflect and transform ourselves and our relationship to the world and each other. This state of affairs will ensure humanity’s rapid demise given the mounting security challenges we now face, that is, unless we can reinstate the faculty of imagination within scientific epistemology and in education, and thus escape our entrapment.