LingLit Journal Scientific Journal for Linguistics and Literature

Nigerian Journalist's Strategies for Overcoming Language Barriers in International News Reporting: A Study of Channels Television

2026-07-13T04:37:54+00:00

Language is critical in producing and disseminating international news, as journalists must gather and interpret information across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This qualitative study, anchored in Gatekeeping and Framing Theory, used in-depth interviews with five Channels Television editorial staff to examine how Nigerian journalists handle language barriers in international reporting. Findings show barriers include interpreting foreign-language documents, understanding culturally embedded expressions, verifying non-English sources, and communicating with foreign-language interviewees. Journalist’s counter these with machine translation tools, multilingual professional networks, international wire services, editorial review, and AI-assisted verification platforms. Though these strategies improve accuracy and efficiency, they’re limited by deadlines, funding, inadequate language training, and dependence on external intermediaries. The study concludes language barriers still reduce the quality and depth of international reporting in Nigerian newsrooms, and recommends investment in language training, multilingual verification systems, and cross-cultural communication skills to boost credibility.

Starry Textscapes: Astronomy, Cultural Memory, and AI in Language and Literature A Critical Review

2026-10-01T05:18:31+00:00

This critical review examines the underexplored convergence of astronomical cultural memory and artificial intelligence in literary studies. Drawing on scholarship in cultural astronomy, memory studies, and AI literary analysis, it argues that both the night sky and algorithmic systems function as memory technologies that organize, transmit, and transform cultural narratives. Traditional constellation lore, from Mesopotamian, East Asian, and Indigenous traditions to medieval European literature has historically encoded cosmic order, social hierarchy, and collective identity into narrative form. Simultaneously, large language models have emerged as generative agents that destabilize authorship and introduce probabilistic mechanisms of textual production. Despite substantial activity in each domain, existing research treats them largely in isolation. To address this gap, the review proposes the concept of Celestial Algorithmic Memory (CAM), a tripartite framework of encoding, transformation, and reception that theorizes how astronomical narratives are digitized, statistically reproduced, and reinterpreted under algorithmic conditions. Methodologically, the study synthesizes peer-reviewed literature (2010–2026) through a systematic search strategy adapted from PRISMA-P principles. Findings highlight persistent divergences between human and AI-generated narratives in emotional depth, moral ambiguity, and cultural specificity, while underscoring the political stakes of training-data selection. The review concludes that as AI increasingly mediates literary production, critical attention to whose celestial narratives are preserved, mutated, or erased becomes an ethical as well as scholarly imperative. CAM thus offers an integrated lens for future interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of cultural astronomy, memory studies, and critical AI literary analysis.

Computational Hermeneutics: Machine Reading and the Epistemology of Literary Interpretation

2026-10-02T03:14:48+00:00

This review evaluates the article "Computational Hermeneutics: Machine Reading and the Epistemology of Literary Interpretation," situating it within the emerging interdisciplinary discourse on artificial intelligence and literary studies. The article advances a theoretically ambitious thesis: that machine reading constitutes not a positivist or anti-hermeneutic practice but a distinctive form of interpretation that both challenges and enriches traditional humanistic hermeneutics. The software code, and even quantified models, has, the article develops three interlocking arguments: that the hermeneutic-positivistic divide in digital humanities is a false dichotomy; that machine reading operates through "interpretive lenses" that shape interpretive attention; and that machine-generated interpretations require renewed engagement with the hermeneutic concepts of situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity. The article's most significant contributions are its rigorous articulation of the epistemological stakes of computational hermeneutics and its nuanced treatment of the "simulated hermeneutic." However, three limitations constrain its impact: an uneven empirical foundation, particularly in its comparative study of human and machine readings; a limited engagement with non-Western and multilingual contexts; and an underdeveloped treatment of power, ideology, and material conditions. The review identifies Habermas's emancipatory interest of hermeneutics of suspicion, and political economy of AI as theoretical resources capable of addressing these gaps. The article ultimately stands as both an important intervention and an invitation to develop an emancipatory computational hermeneutics that integrates critical theory with computational practice.

Celestial Narratives in the Age of AI: A Critical Review of Astronomy, Culture, and Language in Contemporary Literature

2026-10-02T03:44:59+00:00

This review critically examines the intersection of artificial intelligence, astronomy, and cultural narrative in contemporary literature and practice. While no single volume bears the exact title under review, the surveyed literature collectively maps a vibrant and contested field. The analysis synthesizes findings across four domains: the quasi-religious sacralization of AI in popular and anthropological discourse; the "stellar turn" in contemporary fiction and poetry, particularly the trope of astro-eisegesis and the poetics of extraterrestrial encounter; the operational transformation of astronomical practice through AI-driven scheduling and machine learning applied to historical star charts; and Indigenous-led interventions that reframe AI as cultural practice governed by training protocols and narrative sovereignty. The review identifies three unresolved tensions: the gap between AI's discursive sacralization and its material infrastructure; the risk that literary cosmopoetics reproduces the anthropocentrism it critiques; and the insufficient theorization of language politics in AI-mediated translation of ancient astronomical records. It argues that the most vital contributions refuse easy synthesis, insisting on the irreducibility of language, protocol, and Country to algorithmic operations. The celestial narrative proper to the AI age is thus not a single story but a contested space: the story of who gets to tell the story of the sky. The review concludes by calling for sustained dialogue across astronomy, literary studies, anthropology, and Indigenous knowledge systems.

From Lexicon to Cosmology: A Review of Linguistic Dimensions in Cultural Astronomy

2026-10-02T05:45:36+00:00

Cultural astronomy, the study of human relationships with the sky has long been dominated by archaeology and the history of astronomy, while its linguistic dimensions remain systematically undertheorized. This narrative review critically examines representative literature from 2005 to 2026 across four thematic domains: star-name semantics, grammatical encoding of celestial knowledge, linguistic relativity in time concepts, and transmission mechanisms of Indigenous astronomical knowledge. The review finds that celestial naming exhibits stable embodied cognitive patterns across languages, yet borrowing and semantic change pathways are more complex than existing models suggest, as demonstrated by Ge'ez planetary nomenclature and Mesopotamian-Greek star-name transmission. Grammatical encoding—noun classification, numeral classifiers, evidential marking, and absolute spatial frames—reveals language as an active structuring mechanism for astronomical cognition rather than a passive mirror, with Tariana evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr solar-anchored coordinates providing particularly strong evidence. The Amondawa and Aymara cases both challenge and refine the linguistic relativity hypothesis, while their methodological limitations warrant equal scrutiny. Oral genres, Wardaman songlines, Polynesian wayfinding chants, and Rapa Nui material anchors—function as differentiated cognitive storage technologies whose poetic features serve knowledge preservation rather than decoration. The review identifies three systematic limitations in existing scholarship: corpus imbalance favoring written traditions, insufficient interdisciplinary dialogue between linguists and cultural astronomers, and methodological fragility of "absence" judgments. To address these, the paper proposes "celestial semantic domain" as an integrative analytical framework comprising lexical, grammatical, and discourse-genre levels, and argues that cultural astronomy should become a regular domain of semantic typology and language documentation rather than a marginal curiosity. Future priorities include cross-linguistic celestial vocabulary databases, integration of celestial semantics into fieldwork protocols, experimental research on evidentiality and causal reasoning, and cognitive-linguistic models of oral astronomical genres.