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In order to achieve the goals of social commentary and moral judgement pursued in her novels, Jane Austen describes and evaluates different aspects of her characters’ personalities: social attitude, intellectual qualities and moral traits (Lodge 1966). Mansfield Park (1814) is one of her novels in which this moral awareness is most acute. In order to construct a community of shared values with her readers, Austen skilfully alternates different points of view as sources of evaluation. We propose an analysis of the first chapter of Mansfield Park that addresses this dialogic dimension by focusing on the resources of engagement, the subsystem of Appraisal Theory with which speakers/writers express their commitment to the truth of a proposition and their willingness to open the negotiation space to other voices (Martin & White 2005: 97).
The linguistic subtlety and complexity of Jane Austen’s writing is a challenge to translators, who must try to identify all the concurrent interpretation possibilities and reproduce them in the target language. In this article we compare the English source text with various translations into Spanish, Catalan and German. Our analysis focuses on the lexicogrammatical realisations of engagement such as verba dicendi, epistemic expressions, lexical choices with a distinct attitudinal load, and also on the development of narration – as far as that is possible in a study centering on the first chapter –, since it is often the case that narrator stance is modified as the text unfolds.
We discuss fragments of narrator discourse, direct speech and indirect/free indirect speech and consider the advantages of the framework to uncover changes in the evaluative dimension of meaning that affect the readings the translations will afford in their target society, from character building to the articulation of points of view.
Background: There currently are no internationally recognised treatment guidelines for patients with advanced gastric cancer/gastro-oesophageal junction cancer (GC/GEJC) in whom two prior lines of therapy have failed. The randomised, phase III JAVELIN Gastric 300 trial compared avelumab versus physician’s choice of chemotherapy as third-line therapy in patients with advanced GC/GEJC.
Patients and methods: Patients with unresectable, recurrent, locally advanced, or metastatic GC/GEJC were recruited at 147 sites globally. All patients were randomised to receive either avelumab 10 mg/kg by intravenous infusion every 2 weeks or physician’s choice of chemotherapy (paclitaxel 80 mg/m2 on days 1, 8, and 15 or irinotecan 150 mg/m2 on days 1 and 15, each of a 4-week treatment cycle); patients ineligible for chemotherapy received best supportive care. The primary end point was overall survival (OS). Secondary end points included progression-free survival (PFS), objective response rate (ORR), and safety.
Results: A total of 371 patients were randomised. The trial did not meet its primary end point of improving OS {median, 4.6 versus 5.0 months; hazard ratio (HR)=1.1 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.9–1.4]; P= 0.81} or the secondary end points of PFS [median, 1.4 versus 2.7 months; HR=1.73 (95% CI 1.4–2.2); P> 0.99] or ORR (2.2% versus 4.3%) in the avelumab versus chemotherapy arms, respectively. Treatment-related adverse events (TRAEs) of any grade occurred in 90 patients (48.9%) and 131 patients (74.0%) in the avelumab and chemotherapy arms, respectively. Grade ≥3 TRAEs occurred in 17 patients (9.2%) in the avelumab arm and in 56 patients (31.6%) in the chemotherapy arm.
Conclusions: Treatment of patients with GC/GEJC with single-agent avelumab in the third-line setting did not result in an improvement in OS or PFS compared with chemotherapy. Avelumab showed a more manageable safety profile than chemotherapy.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02625623.