Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[ClarissaMach]

Teachers, could you please help me translating the text below?

"For the most part policies supporting media clusters tend to be urban rather than rural industrial development efforts. This occurs because information and communication technology and media personnel are urban oriented, because the technical infrastructures of media and ICT have better capabilities and capacity in urban areas, and because access to related research centers and educational institutions are better in urban areas than rural areas."

In Portuguese, the word "rural" (which is identical to the English word) is associated to backcountry and, let's say, rednecks. I was wondering if when translating I might replace "urban" for "central areas" and "rural" for "peripherical areas"?
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Stormy Weather.

[redset]

Rural doesn't necessarily have a 'backwards' connotation, although that depends on personal perspective! It generally implies countryside, and areas without much building development (including villages, and possibly small towns), often fairly remote. Urban generally means areas within cities, and suburban usually means built-up residential areas outside of the main city.

Cities are often called 'population centres' (because large numbers of people live there), but this could really include the suburbs too, especially in countries where people tend to live outside of cities and only travel into them for work, shopping, recreation etc. And 'peripheral areas' could easily be interpreted as the suburbs too, since they surround the cities themselves.

It wouldn't exactly be clear what you meant if you used those phrases - adding them to the text you quoted would imply that the development efforts are in 'central' areas, and not in areas 'outside' of those areas, but it's a vague definition and doesn't carry the same idea of a divide between built-up areas near cities, and more remote country areas with fewer people.

[ClarissaMach]

Thanks a lot, redset.
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Stormy Weather.