A Comparative Study of Educational Texts for Native, Foreign, and Bilingual Young Speakers of Russian : Are Simplified Texts Equally Simple?

Studies on simple language and simplification are often based on datasets of texts, either for children or learners of a second language. In both cases, these texts represent an example of simple language, but simplification likely involves different strategies. As such, this data may not be entirely homogeneous in terms of text simplicity. This study investigates linguistic properties and specific simplification strategies used in Russian texts for primary school children with different language backgrounds and levels of language proficiency. To explore the structure and variability of simple texts for young readers of different age groups, we have trained models for multiclass and binary classification. The models were based on quantitative features of texts. Subsequently, we evaluated the simplification strategies applied to readers of the same age with different linguistic backgrounds. This study is particularly relevant for the Russian language material, where the concept of easy and plain language has not been sufficiently investigated. The study revealed that the three types of texts cannot easily be distinguished from each other by judging the performance of multiclass models based on various quantitative features. Therefore, it can be said that texts of all types exhibit a similar level of accessibility to young readers. In contrast, binary classification tasks demonstrated better results, especially in the R-native vs. non R-native track (with 0.78 F1-score), these results may indicate that the strategies used for adapting or creating texts for each type of audience are different.Peer reviewe

Global Technical Communication and Content Management: A Study of Multilingual Quality

The field of technical communication (TC) is facing a dilemma. Content management (CM) strategies and technologies that completely reshape writing and translation practices are adopted in an increasing number of TC work groups. One driving factor in CM adoption is the promise of improving quality of multilingual technical texts, all the while reducing time/cost of technical translation and localization. Yet, CM relies on automation and privileges consistency¯an approach that is problematic in global TC with its focus on adapting texts based on the characteristics of end-users. To better understand the interdisciplinary dilemma of multilingual quality in CM, during my dissertation project I conducted a twelve-month long qualitative case study of multilingual quality at a leading manufacturer of medical equipment who had adopted CM strategies and technologies to create technical texts in several languages three years before my study began. In my study, I drew upon an interdisciplinary theoretical base (genre ecology framework, activity theory, actor-network theory, and Skopos theory) to examine the construction of multilingual quality understandings and approaches by global TC stakeholders who are employees and contractors of the company and the role of CM in their practices. Examination of the extensive data I collected through observations, interviews, questionnaires, document collection/content analysis, and software exploration uncovered the staggering disconnects in understandings of and approaches to multilingual quality. These disconnects resulted from the lack communication between stakeholders and were promoted by the different relations to CM technology and the mediating work of the new genre, chunks of content. Inhibited knowledge sharing, risk of expertise invisibility and loss, and constrained new ideas about improving multilingual quality were some of the rhetorical, social, and political implications of these disconnects. As a result of my analysis, I sketched strategies for achieving contextualized multiple-stakeholder approaches to multilingual quality and outlined leadership possibilities for technical communicators in global information development. This analysis provides TC practitioners with strategies for improving multilingual quality in CM contexts; TC educators with ideas for expanding teaching approaches by combining digital and cross-cultural literacies; and TC researchers with opportunities for rhetorical action through critiquing, theorizing, and innovating CM

CLIL Teaching Materials and Text Modification : views and approaches of Finnish teachers in lower secondary school

The concept of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been rapidly adopted in Finland and received with positivity. Having high quality CLIL materials is seen as one of the most essential components of a successful CLIL programme. However, the challenges of producing materials for teaching through a foreign language have widely been acknowledged and have remained for at least three decades. Finland is, in fact, behind many other European countries in terms of CLIL materials production. This study sets three main objectives to address the research gap in CLIL materials design. The first objective is to find out the types of materials teachers use in lower secondary CLIL classrooms in Finland. The second and third objectives are to identify and to evaluate teachers’ approaches to text modification. The study focuses on five secondary teachers who teach non-language subjects to grades 7-9 in English. The qualitative data consist of thematic interviews and teaching materials designed by the participants. A thorough review of over 60 studies is conducted in order to provide a theoretical framework for the evaluation of input modification strategies. The results show that the participants commonly employ these four types of materials: 1) textbooks in Finnish, 2) textbooks in the target language, 3) self-written materials, and 4) adaptations of authentic materials. In the case of adapting authentic materials, the study identified all three main approaches to text modification: simplification, elaboration and rediscursification. All participants used some types of rediscursification strategy. Regardless of their previous teaching experience, most participants use elaboration, though the choice of its substrategy is limited to adding redundancy by paraphrasing. More experienced teachers seem to avoid using simplification strategies whilst less experienced teachers adopt a wide range of strategies of simplification. This study can provide the professionals in the field of CLIL education (e.g. material writers, publishers) with an insight into the reality of how the materials are used by CLIL practitioners. The results may also contribute to CLIL teacher education and in-service training by informing teachers of the commonly used input modification strategies and raising awareness of the effectiveness of these techniques

Museums for all: translation and interpreting for multimodal spaces as a tool for universal accessibility

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has a scientific responsibility to develop analytical methodologies for the textual phenomenon of multimodality, and for the translation strategies associated with it. At the same time, it should aim to provide studies of universal accessibility with a powerful tool for facilitating access to knowledge. This article offers some reflections on the theoretical foundations of AVT and considers how these are projected in the creation of new professional profiles, with specific application to universal accessibility in the museums.La Traducción Audiovisual (TAV) tiene la responsabilidad científica de desarrollar metodologías de análisis para el fenómeno textual de la multimodalidad así como para sus estrategias de traducción, a la vez que ha de proporcionar a los estudios en accesibilidad universal una poderosa herramienta de acceso al conocimiento. Este artículo ofrece reflexiones en torno a los fundamentos teóricos de la TAV y a la proyección de estos en nuevos perfiles profesionales; todo ello aplicado a la accesibilidad museística universal.This article is the English version of “Museos para todos. La traducción e interpretación para entornos multimodales como herramienta de accesibilidad universal” by Catalina Jiménez Hurtado, Claudia Seibel & Silvia Soler Gallego. It was not published on the print version of MonTI for reasons of space. The online version of MonTI does not suffer from these limitations, and this is our way of promoting plurilingualism.AMATRA Project (P07-SEJ/2660)

Computational Approaches to Assisting Patients\u27 Medical Comprehension from Electronic Health Records

Patient-centered care has been established as a fundamental approach to improve the quality of health care in a seminal report by the Institute of Medicine published at the start of the century. Improved access to health information and demand for greater transparency contributed to its move into the mainstream. Research has also demonstrated that actively involving patients in the management of their own health can lead to better outcomes, and potentially lower costs. However, despite the efforts in many areas of medicine to embrace patient-centered care, engaging patients is still considered a challenge. One of the barriers is the lack of effective tools to help patients understand their health conditions, options and their consequences. Patient portals are now widely adopted by hospitals and other healthcare practices to provide patients with the capabilities to view their own Electronic Health Records. They are a rich resource of information for patients. However, the language in the records are generally difficult for patients without training in medicine to understand. Furthermore, the amount of information can often be overwhelming as well. In this work, we propose computational approaches to foster patient engagement from three aspects by exploiting the rich information in the medical records. First, we design a framework to automatically generate health literacy instruments to measure a patient\u27s literacy levels. This framework exploits readily available large scale corpora to generate instruments in a commonly used test format. Second, we investigate methods that can determine the readability of complex documents such as health records. We propose to rank document readability, instead of assigning a grade level or a pre-defined difficulty category. Lastly, we examine the problem of finding targeted educational materials to facilitate patient comprehension of medical notes. We study methods to formulate effective queries from specialized and long clinical narratives. In addition, we propose a neural network based method to identify medical concepts that are important to patients. The three aspects of this work address the issues of the overabundance and technical complexity of medical language in health records. We demonstrate that our approaches are effective with various experiments and evaluation metric

Training versus profession: from traslation to web location

One of the hottest topics of debate in the context of higher education is the existing divide in different regions of the world between university training and the job market. Although no consensus exists on possible ways to solve this, it is probably necessary to seek a balance between passive submission to the fluctuations in market demands, and settling in to educational stagnation. The Translation and Interpreting Degree offered in Spanish universities teaches students specific linguistic, cultural and instrumental knowledge that enables them to solve problems specific to the essential modalities and spheres of translation and interpreting. The job market those graduating in this degree enter is complex, for various reasons [1]. It is a dynamic, multimedia market, focused on speed, which demands high quality, based on teamwork and, above all in recent times, one dominated by localization as an emerging activity [2]. It can be affirmed that, given that translation has evolved in the same manner as its environment, teaching methods must also adapt to the new era and to the reality of the market. We have proposed a teaching-learning environment based on our PATT (Professional Approach to Translator Training) Model [3-4] which, under a social constructivist focus, offers the opportunity to integrate the fundamental subjects of the degree in a way that the training of future translators is guaranteed the necessary coherence provided by this broad vision of the profession. In this context, ICTs are essential tools. Despite the fact that, traditionally, student assessment has focused on the product, that is, the translated text, we argue that the assessment of the translation process, although entailing an enormous challenge, better reflects the acquisition of skills. Furthermore, the ideal situation would be for students, within the framework of continuous training, to be able to manage their own learning experience. We have designed self-assessment and peer review tools that take in a wide range of skills. Within the sphere of translation, localization is the linguistic, cultural and technical translation, and adaptation, of an electronic product into another product aimed at a local market. In the final part of our study we focus on pedagogical issues related to the training of specialised translators and localizers who will be working in the field of web localization.This study was supported by the RD&I Project CSO2015-64532-R (Spanish "Ministry of Science and Innovation") partially funded by the FEDER program of the European Union

Some advances in the study of the translation of manner of motion events. Integrating key concepts of Descriptive Translation Studies and Thinking for Translating

[EN] Manner of motion represents a translation problem, especially between languages that belong to different typological groups, since their users (in this case mainly authors and translators) address the semantic component of Manner in different ways. In order to give a full account of the translation of manner of motion events in a German>Spanish parallel corpus of children¿s and young adult literature, this contribution describes an interdisciplinary study by resorting to the theory of `Thinking for Translating¿ ( Slobin, 1997 , 2000 , 2005 ) and to the hypothesis of translation universals ( Baker, 1993 ; Mauranen & Kujamäki, 2004 ). It presents a proposal of seven translation techniques adapted to Manner of motion, as well as quantitative data regarding these techniques. Qualitative and quantitative data on the semantic subcomponents of Manner (speed, sound, motor pattern, etc.) are also included. The findings confirm that, in terms of Manner of motion, the translation is simpler than the original text and that motor pattern is the semantic subcomponent of Manner that has been affected by translation to the greatest extent.The work for this paper was carried out within the framework of the Covalt research group and the research project "Los corpus en la ensenanza de la traduccion. Ampliacion y explotacion didactica del corpus COVALT", funded by Universitat Jaume I (P1.1B2013-44). I would also like to thank Dr. Ulrike Oster and the two referees for their valuable suggestions.Molés-Cases, T. (2018). Some advances in the study of the translation of manner of motion events. Integrating key concepts of Descriptive Translation Studies and Thinking for Translating. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. 16(1):152-190. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00007.molS15219016

Learning to Learn in a Digital Context: Language Learning Webtasks for an Autonomising “Wreading” Competence

In this paper we aim to analyse how language learning tasks can help students develop an autonomising wreading competence, i.e. a competence involving the ability to read online texts and to construct one’s own text by traversing sites. This competence involves different types of skills: technical skills of information elaboration and management, linguistic and semiotic skills, cognitive skills, and metacognitive skills. We consider, therefore, that the development of the wreading competence calls for a new approach to language learning, based on the joint development of autonomous learning and new literacies. Although new technologies provide quality resources and tools for teachers to design pedagogical environments which meet the principles of learner autonomy, ICT does not foster by itself autonomous learning (Villanueva, 2006). The promotion of learner autonomy requires carefully designed learning tasks aiming at a long-life learning process. The purpose of this paper is to put forward criteria for the design of language learning cybertasks that promote the development of new literacies applied to language learning autonom

New Data-Driven Approaches to Text Simplification

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyMany texts we encounter in our everyday lives are lexically and syntactically very complex. This makes them difficult to understand for people with intellectual or reading impairments, and difficult for various natural language processing systems to process. This motivated the need for text simplification (TS) which transforms texts into their simpler variants. Given that this is still a relatively new research area, many challenges are still remaining. The focus of this thesis is on better understanding the current problems in automatic text simplification (ATS) and proposing new data-driven approaches to solving them. We propose methods for learning sentence splitting and deletion decisions, built upon parallel corpora of original and manually simplified Spanish texts, which outperform the existing similar systems. Our experiments in adaptation of those methods to different text genres and target populations report promising results, thus offering one possible solution for dealing with the scarcity of parallel corpora for text simplification aimed at specific target populations, which is currently one of the main issues in ATS. The results of our extensive analysis of the phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT) approach to ATS reject the widespread assumption that the success of that approach largely depends on the size of the training and development datasets. They indicate more influential factors for the success of the PB-SMT approach to ATS, and reveal some important differences between cross-lingual MT and the monolingual v MT used in ATS. Our event-based system for simplifying news stories in English (EventSimplify) overcomes some of the main problems in ATS. It does not require a large number of handcrafted simplification rules nor parallel data, and it performs significant content reduction. The automatic and human evaluations conducted show that it produces grammatical text and increases readability, preserving and simplifying relevant content and reducing irrelevant content. Finally, this thesis addresses another important issue in TS which is how to automatically evaluate the performance of TS systems given that access to the target users might be difficult. Our experiments indicate that existing readability metrics can successfully be used for this task when enriched with human evaluation of grammaticality and preservation of meaning