Interpreting Heritage is a practical book about the planning and delivery of interpretation that will give anyone working in the heritage sector the confidence and tools they need to undertake interpretation. Steve Slack suggests a broad formula for how interpretation can be planned and executed and describes some of the most popular – and potentially challenging, or provocative – forms of interpretation. Slack also provides practical guidance about how to deliver different forms of interpretation, while avoiding potential pitfalls. Exploring some of the ethical questions that arise when presenting information to the public and offering a grounding in some of the theory that underpins interpretive work, the book will be suitable for those who are completely new to interpretation. Those who already have some experience will benefit from tools, advice and ideas to help build on their existing practice. Drawing upon the author’s professional experiences of working within, and for, the heritage sector, Interpreting Heritage provides advice and suggestions that will be essential for practitioners working in museums, art galleries, libraries, archives, outdoor sites, science centres, castles, stately homes and other heritage venues around the world. It will also be of interest to students of museum and heritage studies who want to know more about how heritage interpretation works in practice.

First published in 1986 Interpreting Japanese Society became something of a classic in its field. In this newly updated edition, the value of anthropological in understanding this ancient and complex nation are clearly demonstrated.

This third volume about legal interpretation focuses on the interpretation of a constitution, most specifically that of the United States of America. In what may be unique, it combines a generalized account of various claims and possibilities with an examination of major domains of American constitutional law. This demonstrates convincingly that the book's major themes not only can be supported by individual examples, but are undeniably in accord with the continuing practice of the United States Supreme Court over time, and cannot be dismissed as misguided. The book's central thesis is that strategies of constitutional interpretation cannot be simple, that judges must take account of multiple factors not systematically reducible to any clear ordering. For any constitution that lasts over centuries and is hard to amend, original understanding cannot be completely determinative. To discern what that is, both how informed readers grasped a provision and what were the enactors' aims matter. Indeed, distinguishing these is usually extremely difficult, and often neither is really discernible. As time passes what modern citizens understand becomes important, diminishing the significance of original understanding. Simple versions of textualist originalism neither reflect what has taken place nor is really supportable. The focus on specific provisions shows, among other things, the obstacles to discerning original understanding, and why the original sense of proper interpretation should itself carry importance. For applying the Bill of Rights to states, conceptions conceived when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted should take priority over those in 1791. But practically, for courts, to interpret provisions differently for the federal and state governments would be highly unwise. The scope of various provisions, such as those regarding free speech and cruel and unusual punishment, have expanded hugely since both 1791 and 1865. And questions such as how much deference judges should accord the political branches depend greatly on what provisions and issues are involved. Even with respect to single provisions, such as the Free Speech Clause, interpretive approaches have sensibly varied, greatly depending on the more particular subjects involved. How much deference judges should accord political actors also depends critically on the kind of issue involved.

Using the model of "reading other people's mail," L. William Countryman proposes that we read the letters of the New Testament as an ongoing conversation between the text itself and the modern interpreter and the community.

Presenting a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics and, in particular, a realistic view of quantum waves, this book defends, with one exception, Schrodinger's views on quantum mechanics. Johansson goes on to defend the view that the collapse of a wave function during a measurement is a real physical collapse of a wave and argues that the collapse is a consequence of quantisation of interaction. Lastly Johansson argues for a revised principle of individuation in the quantum domain and that this principle enables a sort of explanation of non-local phenomena.

Imperative clauses are recognized as one of the major clause types alongside those known as declarative and interrogative. Nevertheless, they are still an enigma in the study of meaning, which relies largely on either the concept of truth conditions or the concept of information growth—neither of which are easily applied to imperatives. This book puts forward a fresh perspective. It analyzes imperatives in terms of modalized propositions, and identifies an additional, presuppositional, meaning component that makes an assertive interpretation inappropriate. The author shows how these two elements can help explain the varied effects imperatives have, depending on their usage context. Imperatives have been viewed as elusive components of language because they have a range of functions that makes them difficult to unify theoretically. This fresh view of the semantics-pragmatics interface allows for a uniform semantic analysis while accounting for the pragmatic versatility of imperatives.

This book describes the constitutions of six major federations and how they have been interpreted by their highest courts, compares the interpretive methods and underlying principles that have guided the courts, and explores the reasons for major differences between these methods and principles. Among the interpretive methods discussed are textualism, purposivism, structuralism and originalism. Each of the six federations is the subject of a separate chapter written by a leading authority in the field: Jeffrey Goldsworthy (Australia), Peter Hogg (Canada), Donald Kommers (Germany), S.P. Sathe (India), Heinz Klug (South Africa), and Mark Tushnet (United States). Each chapter describes not only the interpretive methodology currently used by the courts, but the evolution of that methodology since the constitution was first enacted. The book also includes a concluding chapter which compares these methodologies, and attempts to explain variations by reference to different social, historical, institutional and political circumstances.

Fourteen members of The Context Group honor Bruce J. Malina and his scholarship in this volume by following his consistent example of developing or using explicit social scientific models to interpret documents from the ancient Mediterranean world. Ordinary features of that cultural world such as gossip, reciprocity, a pervasive military presence, the power of women, and becoming a follower of Jesus stand out with greater clarity in the Bible when a reader understands the cultural matrix in which such social dynamics function. These essays reflect The Context Group’s more than twenty years of collaborative experience in researching the cultural context of the Bible. New insights are built on the solidly established foundations of their earlier cross-cultural studies. Readers will find the individual essays enlightening and challenging. Taken as a whole they form a valuable resource and a stimulating and helpful aid to further study.

This book addresses a controversial issue regarding SL-TL transfer in the translation process, namely the question as to the dominant route in English-Chinese and Chinese-English professional consecutive interpretations, respectively: the form-based processing route or meaning-based processing route. It presents a corpus-assisted product study, in which the interpreting processing patterns of culture-specific items (CSIs) are analyzed. The study reveals that the dominant route in English vs. Chinese consecutive interpreting varies under different circumstances. Four factors are proposed to account for such differences: linguistic variables (e.g., grammatical complexity of the unit), type of CSI, language direction, and extra-linguistic variables (e.g., multilateral or bilateral settings). In summary, the book systematically introduces a corpus-assisted approach to translation process research, which will benefit all readers who are interested in translation process research but cannot employ neuroscientific measures.

A book on legal philosophy, necessarily, focuses attention on law. In addition to this focus, An Introduction to an African Legal Philosophy focuses attention on philosophy. The link between law and philosophy is brought into relief, which is done through an African context. An attempt is made to spell out what is African about legal philosophy without being cut off of African legal philosophy from non-African legal philosophy. The book draws attention to the view that a basic component of African legal philosophy consists of an investigation of what it is to be an African, and because an African is a human being among other human beings, the investigation is about what it is to be a human being. Ubuntuism is an African-derived word that captures this mode of being human. Moreover, because human beings are cultural beings, African cultural context guides the investigation. Inescapably, it is claimed that, every legal philosophy is embedded in a culture. African legal philosophy is not an exception. It is deeply rooted in African culture –a culture that is today shaped, in part, by a European colonialist culture. One feature that will strike one as one reads the book is that the book approaches African legal philosophy as a means of decolonization of African culture. African legal philosophy can accomplish this intelligently and effectively if it is itself decolonized. In doing this it contrasts sharply with mainstream Western legal philosophy.