The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of history and culture on the passage of the comic book to the animated film. Although the comic book has both historical and cultural components, the latter often undergoes a cultural shift in the animation process. Using the Smurfs as a case study, this investigation first reviews existing literature pertaining to the comic book as an art form, the influence of history and culture on Smurf story plots, and the translation of the comic book into a moving picture. This study then utilizes authentic documents and interviews to analyze the perceptions of success and failure in the transformation of the Smurf comic book into animation: concluding that original meaning is often altered in the translation to meet the criteria of cultural relevance for the new audiences.

Written in French, this thesis presents a comparative and intertextual study on the theme of « windows » in four poems by Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marie Krysinska and Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 -1898), Marie Krysinska (1857-1908) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) use « windows » as a common theme in their poetry. My study compares this common theme found in four poems: (1) “Les fenêtres” by Charles Baudelaire in Spleen de Paris XXXV, 1869. (2) “Les fenêtres” by Stéphane Mallarmé in Le Parnasse Contemporain, 1863/66. (3) “Les fenêtres” by Marie Krysinska in Rythmes pittoresques, 1890. (4) “Les fenêtres” by Guillaume Apollinaire in Calligrammes (1913-1916), 1918. I focus on what distinguishes these fours poems by following the evolution of poetical forms between symbolism and futurism/surrealism. The common theme (“windows”) provides an opportunity to better underline the formal heterogeneity which separates these different “poetical avenues”: with Baudelaire, the newness of prose poetry; with Mallarmé, the symbolist renewal of a more classic form; with Apollinaire, a form of simultaneity inspired by futurism. The comparative analysis brings to light the original value of the poem written by Krysinska, whose works have not greatly captivated the attention of critics.

This exploratory case study aims to develop a set of best practices for integrating online discussion forums into the foreign language curriculum, focusing specifically on a group of learners in an advanced French grammar course at a large, public U.S. university. During a period of two months, 26 participants completed a series of tasks designed to provide three different types of data: 1) exploration and analysis of interactional, linguistic, and social features of Web forum discourse; 2) participation in Web forums; and 3) feedback from students. Since the feedback received from two questionnaires was ultimately the most consistent and reliable type of data collected, this study focuses on students' participation patterns and their perceptions of Web forums as a communication space having the potential to provide opportunities for learning French. Although some students indicated that they would neither consider visiting a French-language Web forum nor actually visit one, in both cases, more than half of the participants who completed these questionnaires indicated that they would both consider visiting a French-language Web forum and might actually visit one. Since encouraging students to use French beyond the classroom and to engage in the lifelong use of French for personal enrichment (following the …

Translation and subtitling has always been a complicated dimension of the motion picture industry for years. The problem of dealing with linguistic elements in films and conveying them to audiences of different languages across the globe encompasses many difficulties regarding forms and structures of other languages. One of the more highly researched topics in French linguistic studies has been the use of address pronouns and a range of aspects related to their use and interpretation. Many studies have been conducted over the last sixty years in order to determine and understand these variables. An analysis of several of these studies reveals the many complexities involved in second-person pronoun choice in the French language and the development of the idea of pronoun choice as an act of social identity. The focus of this study is to provide an analysis of the use of formal and informal address pronoun use in the French subtitling and dubbing of an American film, Maid in Manhattan, in order to add, on a broader level, a way to differentially examine perceived norms in a variety of contexts within this medium.