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This paper aims to use Cantonese interview data to explore how (im)politeness is used as a discursive strategy and resource to attend to the perceived interactional goal and power relationship in the interview setting. It adopts a situation-oriented and ethnography-driven approach to study politeness as a situated action. In addition to investigating Cantonese-specific features of politeness, the study demonstrates that power relation in politeness should be analyzed at the level of the entire communicative event as well as at the turn-to-turn level. Findings of this study are significant not only for extending politeness research to less commonly studied languages like Cantonese, but also for expanding the application of politeness theories to other research areas such as institutional discourse and survey research.

This study investigates politeness phenomena in Chinese service encounters, contrasting the use of facework in two types of service encounters: state-run vs. privately-owned stores. I argue that politeness is a dynamic process, which involves participants' perception of a social setting and the assumed interpersonal relationship in a given situation. It is shown that social distance and the type of social relationship play an essential role in Chinese politeness behavior and that the use of facework in service encounters signals a change in discursive practice due to social and economic changes in China.

"This study aims to develop an assessment tool to evaluate multilingual questionnaires by categorizing the types of translation issues that can lead to measurement errors in cross-cultural surveys. Based on the results of two multilingual projects that cognitively pretested the 2010 U.S. Census questionnaire in five languages and the American Community Survey questionnaire in two languages, we developed a coding scheme guided by sociolinguistic approaches to language and culture to evaluate translated questionnaires by classifying translation issues. In this paper we discuss how the coding scheme is useful in the evaluation of multilingual questionnaires and how it could be integrated productively into the development of such questionnaires and the early rounds of translation. We also suggest feasible solutions to translation issues, to ensure translation quality and achieve not only semantic but functional equivalence across translations." (author's abstract)

Pan and Kadar's exciting research compares historical and contemporary Chinese (im)polite communication norms and maps the similarities and differences between them. Considering the importance of China on the world stage, understanding Chinese politeness norms is pivotal, to both experts of communication studies and those who have interactions with the Chinese community

Pan and Kadar''s exciting research compares historical and contemporary Chinese (im)polite communication norms and maps the similarities and differences between them. Considering the importance of China on the world stage, understanding Chinese politeness norms is pivotal, to both experts of communication studies and those who have interactions with the Chinese community

"The experimental study described in this paper examined the impact of providing special instructions and supporting material to translators. Specifically, it addressed whether Spanish, Chinese, and French translators provided with explanatory text and guidelines were able to produce translations that were more faithful to the intended meaning of English source survey items, as well as that were more culturally appropriate and natural sounding compared to those of translators who received no such guidance. Study findings indicate that while the provision of special instructions and documentation to translators had a considerable impact on their translations, the direction of the impact (positive or negative) differed across the target languages, according to scale ratings of professional survey researchers who were native speakers of those languages." (author's abstract)