Saturday 4 June 2016

Translation of William J. Luther’s Article on Bitcoin into Cantonese Webcomic

Translation of William J. Luther’s Article on Bitcoin into Cantonese Webcomic
Bitcoin and the Future of Digital Payments is an academic article authored by William J. Luther. It explores distinct factors that affect the possibility of bitcoin adoption is a form of currency in the future. The author discusses in detail the challenges that online users have as they attempt to adopt the digital currency. Some of these obstacles include alt-coins and the trust that businesses and people have placed on the existent traditional forms of currencies. Furthermore, the author projects that bitcoins and other forms of digital currencies are the future, given the rapid advancement of technology and the rate at which businesses, governments, and individuals adopt it to ensure efficiency and safety in transactions (Androulaki et al., 36). The author incorporates several instances of webcomic conversations in his article for an average reader to understand and to decipher technical terms as applied in the article.
Webcomic genre, when applied to an academic or peer-reviewed article, instills a form of entertainment into the document, hence ensuring a guarantee of easier absorption and retention of its message (Walters 17). Authors like William J. Luther understand the importance of injecting sarcastic and comic tone to their work for a wider reach and to elicit curiosity in readers that would otherwise brush off the article as too technical, or too academic for them to read. The subject matter of his article concerns the general public hence there is a need to refine content to suit people's needs rather than restricting its knowledge and understanding to an academic setting. However, it is clear that the author is careful not to divert from his main goal of laying down facts regarding sustained use and eventual adoption of digital currencies t replace traditional physical and nonflexible forms.
The picture is clearer when a case about a debt collector residing in Los Angeles during the last decade is considered. Given the nature of the environment that this collector hails from, it is expected that his dialect will be vulgar and colloquial to represent the inner-city dialect. However, there is an unexpected transition and transformation of the character's dialect to represent comic meta-humor. His change symbolizes the societal adoption of digital forms of currency and the phasing out of the traditional forms of currency such as crude paper money.
An inclusion of Cantonese dialogue that features Chinese dialect has a vulgar humor to appeal to webcomic audience. It demonstrates the breadth of audience that the author anticipated and targeted for his article. Besides, it reinforces the idea that colloquial language use is necessary to entertain a young generation of the audience in the United States, Hong Kong, and other parts of the world. webcomic writers focus on fulfilling the needs of young adults because they constitute a significant fraction of the population and form the largest segment of webcomic fan base. 
In summary, it is clear that when the content of the article is translated into webcomics, critical content can easily be lost, though the needs of the majority of the audience are met. The fashion of presentation becomes subtle and less straightforward which is easily notable, especially if the reader is keen. Luther succeeds in integrating his speculation and recommendation on bitcoin as a form of currency for the future in the story's plot. The debt collector demonstrates the use of cryptocurrencies for darker and illegal practices, especially by persons that intend to remain anonymous during transactions (Reid and Harrigan 212). 

















Works Cited
Androulaki, Elli, et al. "Evaluating user privacy in bitcoin." Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. 34-51.
Reid, Fergal, and Martin Harrigan. An Analysis of Anonymity in The Bitcoin System. New York: Springer Publishers, 2013: 297-223. Print.

Walters, Maria. "What's up with Webcomics? Visual and Technological Advances in Comics." Interface: The Journal of Education, Community, and Values 9.2 (2012): 1-76. Print

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