Magdalena Ciubăncan is currently a Lecturer at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania, with a PhD in Philology-Linguistics. Her research is centered on topics in contrastive linguistics (English/Japanese/Romanian), with a focus on the relation between culture and language, and on foreign language teaching methodology and practice. Aside from teaching and research, her activity also includes translating fiction and non-fiction works from Japanese and English into Romanian. She is a former president of the Association of Japanese Language Teachers in Romania and, in 2005, she was awarded Honorary Citizenship by the Mayor of Saitama City (Japan) for promoting international friendship.