Lucas Funaro

UCSB, Writing 2 – Prof. Allison Bocchino

Translating Genres: From Academic to Digital

Nowadays, many people can carry their daily life without stepping foot outside of their

house. What was once for our parents and grandparents an activity that required getting off the

couch and driving for a couple of minutes, is now at the tips of our fingers. If my mom suddenly

realized that she ran out of toilet paper, for example, a quick and possibly embarrassing 20-

minute walk to the nearby market would be the most convenient option. If I, on the other hand,

realized the same thing while sitting on the toilet with my phone, a few clicks would be more

than enough to solve my problem and avoid an uncomfortable, dirty walk. This simple example

of generational differences makes explicit a much larger and impactful phenomenon that has

been happening in the past decades: a transition from physical to online. Newspapers became

app-notifications, movie theaters are now streaming platforms, and concerts are watched through

YouTube live events.

This process of change is what inspired me to translate an academic journal article into a

Twitter thread: thinking that, maybe in the distant future, academic journals and scientific

information will be available on Twitter just like the news is available on the app today. Having

reliable scientific sources as part of social media would also open space for different groups of

people that are not usually present in the app community, such as Ph.D. students and professors,

to come in contact and interact with the layman public. In order to write my translation of an

academic article into a Twitter thread conversation between a professor and the layman public,

many details specific to each genre such as the tone, the diction, and the audience had to be taken
into consideration. Besides that, careful reading and analysis of the primary text were necessary

to ensure that the main message was still preserved on the translated version.

Before I dive into the comparisons it is important to make explicit that, since Twitter is

such a huge platform comprising of many different genres, the particular genre of tweet that I

translated the primary text into had to be defined. In the process of considering the possible

genres, it was useful to revisit Melzer’s text about discourse communities, especially where the

author explains how “genres arise out of social purposes, and they’re a form of social action

within discourse communities.”1 Melzer’s words were very helpful since, when looking for

different tweets, I was able to focus on the social interaction between users and what the

common purpose of the interaction was. As a result, the genre of tweet included in my translation

can be described as “conversational/colloquial Twitter threads.” A good example of a tweet that

fits this category is the post from @fobbsmagazine in which the user expresses their thoughts

without prior context, saying that “when it’s pretty outside i feel like doing something but then

what is there to do.”2

One of the first key steps when translating between two different genres is to have a good

understanding of the primary source. More important than understanding the content of the

academic text itself was understanding the genre conventions and the discourse community to

which it pertains. This is because the content, in most translation-related situations (like from one

language to another), is the exclusive subject of the translation, but in this case, where the

translation involves genre, taking into consideration other factors such as purpose and context of

the writing plays a much larger role. That being said, a thorough analysis of "(Neo)Shamanic

1
Dan Melzer, “Understanding Discourse Communities,” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 3 (Parlor
Press, 2020), pp. 100-115.

2
Jordan Fobbs, Twitter post, February 2021, 12:44.
Dialogues: Encounters between the Guarani and Ayahuasca" by Esther Jean Langdon and Isabel

Santana De Rose was crucial. Knowing that the primary source was an academic article on the

subject of anthropology already hinted that the language was formal and somewhat complex

according to the expectations of other specialists in the same field. One example of how jargon

and intricate concepts are a common characteristic of humanities academic writing can be seen

when the authors explain the idea of another reputed anthropologist. Langdon and De Rose

explained that the idea of perspectivism “is a complex notion that synthesizes research

concerning symbolic ecology, eschatology, nature, culture, the body, and the notion of

transformation (...).”3 Contrary to the expectations of the anthropological academic community,

Twitter posts are generally written in a casual manner. In the particular case of “conversational/

colloquial Twitter threads”, the writing style is very informal with no expectations for proper use

of punctuation, spelling, or grammar.

Another key component of Twitter text is the use of emojis which is normally used to

emphasize what was written or to express the author’s emotions. The famous female rapper

Saweetie posted on her Twitter a great example of how emojis are used to emphasize emotions:

“I’m at the dentist 🥺🥺😓😓😓😓😩😩😩😭😭😭😭😫😫

🤯🤯😫 stressed
😫 out pray 4 me 😥😥.”4 The

use of such expressive figures is widespread on Twitter and is capable of adding some level of

drama into the tweets, helping the author to transmit their feelings more effectively to the public.

One of the least challenging steps of the translation was converting the formal language from the

article to the casual speech used on Twitter since it was only a matter of simplifying some

complicated vocabulary and adding a few emojis. In addition, social media is known for being

3
Esther Jean Langdon and Isabel Santana Rose, “(Neo)Shamanic Dialogues: Encounters between the Guarani and
Ayahuasca,” Nova Religio 15, no. 4 (January 2012): pp. 36-59, https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.4.36.

4
Saweetie, Twitter post, February 2021, 1:28PM
the birthplace of much slang that popularize nowadays, so when deciding which slang to include

was a process based on Boyd’s idea that slang “strives to be current, and it circulates among a

select network of users.”5 This meant that I had to take into consideration how current the slang

were and the users (profiles) in order to decide whether or not to include the internet jargon,

which ultimately allowed me to distinguish between the vocabulary of a young adult and a

college professor, for example.

A much more challenging component of the translation process was deciding which ideas

presented by the author should be kept on the translated version. It seemed clear to me that

maintaining the original idea of the thesis as unaltered as possible was essential since, on

academic texts, the thesis drives the development of the rest of the essay. As a consequence, out

of all the tweets with concepts retrieved from the original text, the one containing the thesis was

the most important. Apart from the thesis, other important background information from the

article, such as historical and social contextualization, had to be included in the tweets in order to

highlight the same ideas that the original authors judged to be important for the understanding of

their text. In order to do so, I included some terms such as “Santo Daime”, “shamanism”, and

“dialogs”.

Another challenge that I came across only when writing the tweets was regarding the

profiles that would participate in the Twitter thread. Because I decided to make a dialogical

thread, it was necessary to include at least two different characters as part of the conversation.

But besides the minimum number of characters for a conversation, the background knowledge

that each profile would bring into the thread drove me to create four users in total. The necessity

of approaching some complicated anthropological terms and expressing ideas that can be
5
Janet Boyd, “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking).” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 3 (Parlor Press,
2011), pp. 87-101.
considered “non-popular knowledge” lead to the creation of the “Anthropology prof.” profile.

Similarly, I wanted to include someone with direct but non-academic experience about the topic,

which culminated in the creation of the “Pajé” character. The user who started the thread, Ethan,

was created as a young adult that has no knowledge about most of the topics approached in the

research paper and the last character, an old man, was inserted into the conversation just for the

sake of continuity and fluidity of the dialogue.

Thus, it is possible to conclude that the process of translating an academic paper into a

social-media-based conversation was an instigating experience that allowed me to not only

imagine a future where scientific information is inserted into the social media world but also to

deepen my understanding of genres and writing conventions. The audience, the tone, the

language, and the formatting are only a few examples of characteristics that had to be taken into

account when translating ideas between an academic and a non-academic genre.

 TRANSLATION
(Read the thread starting at the first tweet in the left column, followed by the tweets under it, and then the ones in the second column)
 WORKS CITED

Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking).” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,

Volume 3 (Parlor Press), 2011, pp. 87-101. Accessed February 22, 2021.

Esther Jean Langdon, and Isabel Santana De Rose. "(Neo)Shamanic Dialogues:

Encounters between the Guarani and Ayahuasca." Nova Religio: The Journal of
Alternative and Emergent Religions 15, no. 4 (2012): 36-59. Accessed January 25, 2021.
doi:10.1525/nr.2012.15.4.36.

Fobbs, Jordan. Twitter post, February 22, 2021. 12:44.

https://twitter.com/fobbsmagazine/status/1363952803828277248?s=21

Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Writing Spaces: Readings on

Writing, Volume 3 (Parlor Press), 2020, pp.100-115. Accessed February 22, 2021.

Saweetie. Twitter post, February 18, 2021. 1:28PM.

https://twitter.com/Saweetie/status/1362514241073291266?s=20