The Discourse around Cancel Culture as an Object of Linguocultural and Translation Analysis: Logic vs “Logic”

Abstract

The article deals with discursive manifestation forms of the cultural and ideological content of cancel culture and woke movements. It is suggested that these phenomena are connected by cause (woke) and effect (cancel) relation. Both are analyzed in terms of the discursive semantics, which is mainly concerned with the critics’ narratives of the above phenomena, the positions of their proponents being poorly verbalized. Nevertheless, just as an example, we present a linguistic analysis of the petition posted by US undergraduate students. The category of proponents also includes representatives of management structures, described by the words government (AmE) and illiberal bureaucracies whose meanings are extremely broad in American culture, which may cause some misunderstanding. The translation interpretation of woke and cancel cultures is also supported by linguo-stylistic and cultural information from English and Russian dictionaries on the words cancel and culture. As a result, it is proved that the phrase cancel culture can have the following adequate context-related correspondences: “culture” of cancellation and “cancellation” of culture. However, in the opposite direction (from Russian to English), for similar content, the equivalents woke, wokeness, wokeism appear to be much more precise, especially if cultural or social values are implied rather than pop celebrities.