Iberica 13 ibérica 45 (2023): 1-6 iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784 https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.44.7 Editorial We would like to welcome readers to this issue of Ibérica, which brings together articles from New Zealand, Ukraine, the USA, China, Ghana, Hong Kong, Iran, and of course Spain. Both the geographical spread and the range of topics covered reflect the journal’s commitment to serving the LSP community across the world and reaching out to contiguous disciplines such as specialised translation and communication. In first place, An Cheng’s “Forum” article stresses the need for LSP practitioners to learn about disciplinary-specific writing traditions by interacting with faculty, reading published research, and engaging critically with academic writing guidebooks. His paper is entirely aligned with the aims of Ibérica in this sense: we need to keep up to date with the way professionals are writing in the disciplines, be aware of work that researchers such as AELFE members are doing, and adopt a critical stance to guidelines that may often be outdated or irrelevant. After this, setting the tone for this spring 2023 issue of Ibérica by foregrounding multilingual contexts and practices, David Lasagabaster’s guest article examines the complex challenges facing universities that are committed to multilingualism beyond EMI, calling for stronger collaboration between LSP professionals working in different languages and disciplines. He shows how current developments in his own university also mean encouraging positive attitudes towards plurilingualism and pluriliteracies, involving changes in teaching practices to embrace the value of linguistic mediation and translanguaging. The first full research paper in issue 45 takes up the challenge set by An Cheng by looking at the important topic of research communication, dissemination and popularisation. Jean Parkinson contributes to the teaching of scientific dissemination and popularisation by examining how master’s students in biology performed in an assignment-type modelled on a scientific dissemination genre. The genre used was exemplified by published “News and Views” articles, normally written by experts, which summarise and critique a newly published study for the wider scientific community. Parkinson compares a corpus of 30 “News and Views” assignments by 1 ibérica 45 (2023): 1-6 EDITOrIAL master’s biology students with 55 biology “News and Views” articles written by experts, and documents the students’ difficulties in judging how to engage with their readership and develop an authoritative voice. In the next article, still on the topic of wider scientific communication, Pilar Mur Dueñas then offers an overview of European project websites, understood as having multiple functions for both internal and external communication. She identifies three main areas that such websites are expected to cover, namely dissemination (i.e., democratising scientific knowledge), promotion (of the group itself, but also of the scientific field in question) and public engagement (whereby the website fulfils an “accountability” function by showing that the project tasks are being completed according to plan). She identifies a range of genres that typically appear in the context of such websites, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and showing how they adapt complex material to address different audiences. Continuing with the theme of websites but moving into corporate communications, Ana María Fernández-Vallejo then presents a useful approach to analysing the communication of sustainability in corporate websites, focusing on contribution of visual affordances to the overall sustainability message. She examines the use of visual artefacts depicting sustainability information by the most sustainable hotel chains on their websites, centring on 330 images from the five most sustainable hotel chains according to the Sustainability Yearbook 2022, and develops a taxonomy with six categories into which the images on the websites can be classified. The findings demonstrate a clear inclination towards photographs of people, specifically images featuring the “people dimension”, with implications for the way sustainability is conceptualised in this sector. Her paper continues the tradition in Ibérica of multimodal analysis of corporate communications (see, for example, Pérez Cañizares, 2022), and we hope it will prompt further contributions. Continuing with the theme of Internet-based communication but in a very different context, Tetiana Biletska, Olha Havryliuk, Vita Goian and Oles Goian from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv then open the interesting area of sports blogs, which has rarely been explored by applied linguists. They identify the main communicative strategies used in sports blogs and analyse their linguistic operationalisation. They show how the bloggers creatively combine information with entertainment, and make frequent use of strategies intended to prompt feedback, thus guaranteeing interaction with their audience and boosting their own popularity. 2 After this, in a paper that addresses the applied linguistics research community, Jihua Dong looks at how a research topic evolves into a research field, using the principles of bibliometric analysis to address the field of metadiscourse research, which is so familiar to all of us in LSP/LAP. The author describes three main stages in the history of metadiscourse research: an emerging stage from 1983 onwards; a maturing stage starting about 2005 in which the scope of metadiscourse was explored and broadened; and finally the flourishing stage (beginning around 2015), in which the research themes and methods established in the two preceding stages receive further development. The author also identifies 12 papers with transformative potential and three particularly significant papers: these highly cited papers were influential because they contained innovations that had not been previously introduced in the studies they cited. Ibérica has a tradition of publishing papers on under-researched genres, and issue 45 contributes two interesting papers from very different contexts: the Spanish electricity bill and the Ghanaian documentation relating to land regularisation, both of which have considerable importance in the societies where they are used, and shed interesting light on the theory and practice of genre analysis. In the first of these, Blas-José Subiela-Hernández, Alba-María Gálvez-Vidal and María-Ascensión Miralles González-Conde provide a detailed analysis of the regulated electricity bill in Spain, approaching this topic from a double perspective. First, they ask whether the text complies with standards of coherence, cohesion, informativity and situationality. In the second part, they use quantitative methodology to identify whether this document complies with the grammatical recommendations of plain language. They conclude that despite efforts made to use plain language, the bill is still not comprehensible to the citizens who receive it. In the second of these articles, Emmanuel Mensah Bonsu, Joseph Afful and Guangwei Hu present a corpus-based genre analysis of letters of regularisation, which is explained as an extremely important genre in the context of land institutions in Ghana. After presenting a move analysis, the authors turn their attention to politeness in this genre, and to the textual manifestations of gratitude. This paper represents a useful contribution to the study of non-academic genres, affording welcome insights into the African context. Training is an important theme that has been handled regularly over the years in Ibérica, and this issue brings us two papers with a bearing on this subject, one addressing the training of translators in the 21st century, when their profession is being revolutionised by technological advances, the other EDITOrIAL ibérica 45 (2023): 1-6 3 dealing with teacher training for the growing area of LSP in Spanish. First, María José Varela Salinas and ruth Burbat dare to break one of the taboos that has prevailed in translator training by bringing DeepL and Google Translate into the classroom. They conclude that tools of this kind have radically changed the work of the professional translator and are here to stay. It is therefore quite logical that post-editing machine translated texts should also be a part of the training programmes offered to students at university level. Following on from this, Lucía Gil de Montes-Garín and Carmen Oliva- Sanz provide a useful overview of the training provided for Spanish for Specific Purposes teachers in Spanish university master’s degrees. They found 27 modules designed to train teachers for Spanish for Specific Purposes, within which a theoretical perspective appeared to predominate over more practical approaches. Interestingly, the most common type of specific area addressed was business and administrative Spanish, but some universities also offered courses on teaching Spanish related to tourism, the legal-economic field, health professions, and academic purposes. Finally, we end the research paper section with two papers that will be interesting to those interested in the practice of scientific or academic writing and how it is taught. Building on one of the themes introduced by An Cheng in the “Forum” article, namely the need to interact with professionals in the discipline in order to understand how they write and what obstacles they encounter, Songsha ren and Guangwei Hu present a case study of doctors in mainland China. This focuses on their scholarly publishing activities, and how they drew on an array of tools and signs to resolve contradictions and further their scholarly publishing endeavours. Interviews with two doctors were subjected to a thematic analysis and an activity systems analysis, revealing both difficulties with language and genre, and strategies for overcoming them. This study points to the need for institutional policies and initiatives to support non-native medical doctors aspiring for international publication. In methodological terms this paper is innovative in that it draws on Engeström’s (2015) activity system analysis, which helped the authors to bring the less explicit elements of the practitioners’ action out into the open. This article provides valuable pointers for anyone engaged in designing training courses for such professionals. After this, Ali Derakhshan, Sedigheh Karimpour and Mostafa Nazari focus on the little-understood topic of EAP practitioners’ emotions and how these are involved in their identity construction. Their paper uses Zembylas’s EDITOrIAL ibérica 45 (2023): 1-64 (2002) three-dimensional framework of teacher emotions to understand the emotional processes that EAP teachers go through in terms of their identity and agency. This article opens up the way for further studies on practitioner emotions and identity within LSP contexts (see also Breeze & Azparren Legarre, 2021), and provides an interesting complement to Lasagabaster’s guest article on multilingual universities in the present issue. Finally, this issue offers three reviews. First, Haoda Feng reviews Corpus Linguistics for English for Academic Purposes, by Vander Viana and Aisling O’Boyle (routledge, 2022), explaining how this monograph provides an accessible discussion of key concepts, methods and applications of corpus linguistics that are relevant to the EAP community. After this, Alicia Hernando-Garreta provides an overview of Kayo Kondo’s monograph on Patient-Centred Communication: Discourse of In-Home Medical Consultations for Older Adults (Multilingual Matters, 2022), a relevant volume for all those interested in patient-centred communication across different settings and cultures. Finally, again on the theme of health communication but from a very different perspective, Jiayu Wang reviews Metaphors of Coronavirus: Invisible Enemy or Zombie Apocalypse? by Jonathan Charteris-Black (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), which takes an in-depth look at the moral foundations of metaphors for talking about phenomena related to the pandemic, and contributes to our ongoing understanding of this complex issue. We would like to conclude the introduction to this spring issue of Ibérica by bringing together a number of themes that are significant for a journal with our specific mission. As we all know, Ibérica is a not-for-profit, open access journal that aims to reach the widest possible readership of practitioners and researchers in the area of languages for specific purposes and professional communication across the world. In times of increasing competition, it is important that we should be true to our own values, aiming to foster integrity and diversity, while aspiring to a high level of academic excellence. It is also essential that we should meet the needs of teachers and professional communities, and that we should give due consideration to the many different settings and languages in which specialised communication takes place. For this reason, we would like to end by thanking all of those members of the professional community who have supported us in this venture. We thank our authors for their excellent contributions and their willingness to adapt to schedules that are sometimes inconvenient. We thank the AELFE EDITOrIAL ibérica 45 (2023): 1-6 5 Board and the President of AELFE, Alejandro Curado, for their continued support of the journal and their useful feedback on our editorial activities, and we also express our gratitude to the Editorial and International Advisory Boards who have helped to build up the reputation of Ibérica over the years. However, our very special thanks also go to our reviews Editor Jesús García Laborda, and to the many peer reviewers for this issue, whose work is absolutely essential to guarantee the quality of what we publish: Mahmoodreza Atai, Miguel Ayerbe, Samuel Azasu, Olga Boginskaya, Maria Vittoria Calvi, Nekane Celayeta, Iria da Cunha, Ardita Dylgjeri, Ana María Fernández-Vallejo, Pilar Gerns, Frank Harslem, Bernadette Hofer-Bonfim, Kevin Jiang, ricardo-María Jiménez-Yáñez, Kathrin Kaufhold, Yongyan Li, Belén López Arroyo, Laura Muresan, raffaella Negretti, Alan Partington, Andrea Peterlicean, Miguel ruiz Garrido, Miguel Vela Tafalla, Elaine Vine, Ying Wang, Christopher Williams. We sincerely thank them all for their generosity and dedication. Ruth Breeze, University of Navarra (Spain) Maria Kuteeva, Stockholm University (Sweden) Editors-in-Chief iberica@aelfe.org References EDITOrIAL ibérica 45 (2023): 1-66 Breeze, R., & Azparren Legarre, M. P. (2021). Understanding change in practice: Identity and emotions in teacher training for content and language integrated learning (CLIL). International Journal of Language Studies, 15(3), 25-44. Engeström, Y. (2015). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Pérez Cañizares, P. (2022). Visualising Corporate Social Responsibility: The evolving role of photographs in Inditex’s corporate reporting. Ibérica, Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 43, 155-178. https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.43.155 Zembylas, M. (2002). Constructing genealogies of teachers’ emotions in science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39, 79-103. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.10010