Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

Beyond spelling: the writing skills of higher education students with dyslexia

To have a clearer idea of the problems students with dyslexia may face during their studies, we compared writings of 100 students with dyslexia and 100 age matched control students in higher education. The aim of this study was to compare the writing of young adults with dyslexia and young adults without dyslexia. The study was carried out in Belgium with writers of Dutch. First, we studied the number and type of spelling errors, the quality of the texts produced, the use of words, and the handwriting, both in a précis writing task (writing a summary of an informative text) and in a dictation task (sentence writing). Our results showed medium to large effect sizes for spelling errors: d = .93 for morphosyntactic spelling errors, d = .55 for memory-related spelling errors, and a medium effect size for punctuation and capitalization errors, d = .40. Second, experts who were blind to the aims of the study were asked to judge the quality of the writing of both groups based on transcriptions that were free from spelling errors. The quality of the texts produced was judged lower for students with dyslexia than for the controls, d = .61 for text structure and d = .56 for agreeability, even though the number and types of words used by both groups were very much the same. There was no significant difference in the quality of the handwriting, d = .15. Given that remedial teaching has been shown to be effective for essay-writing skills, educational support along these lines may be helpful for students with dyslexia

The polylogue project: part 1: shortmind

The aim of this collaborative project [edited by F. Senn, E. Mihalycsa and J. Wawrzycka], the work of ten authors and covering more than ten languages, is to chart the possibilities of translation to recreate in the TL texts, the anomalous, elliptic, pre-grammatical, inchoative forms that became almost a signature mark of the Joycean interior monologue, and which here are called 'shortmind'. It therefore addresses such issues as indeterminacy, (anomalous) word order, punctuation, ellipsis, polysemy, ungrammaticality, linguistic sub-standards etc., and examines the (un)willingness of translation texts to breach ingrained rules and norms of (syntactic, narrative) control, correctness and coherence, in the TL culture

Revised final proposal for encoding the Lontara (Buginese) script in the UCS

This is a proposal to encode the Buginese script in the international character encoding standard Unicode. The script was published in Unicode Standard version 4.1 in March 2005. The Buginese script, also known as Lontara, is attested at least in the 14c CE. It is used on Sulawesi in Indonesia to write the Buginese language. Earlier it was also used to write the Makasar, Bimanese, and Madura languages

Adding spaces to Thai and English: Effects on reading

Most research on reading has used Western languages, which have the property of being spaced. This paper examines how spacing and meaning affect reading in Thai, a modern, alphabetic and unspaced language. Results show that subjects were faster in reading and made less errors when spaces were added. Meaning facilitates reading as well, and does not interact with spacing. Finally, ability to read unspaced texts in Thai does not transfer to English. The results support the hypothesis that spaces, when present at all, offer perceptual cues that facilitate reading. Efficiency considerations raise the question of whether Thai should follow the example of Western languages and incorporate spaces and punctuation

Proposal for encoding the Batak script in the UCS

This is a proposal to encode the Batak script in the international character encoding standard Unicode. This script was published in Unicode Standard version 6.0 in October 2010. Batak is used to write five Batak dialects that are spoken on the island of Sumatra: Karo, Mandailing, Pakpak, Simalungun, and Toba

Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: experiments in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual retrieval

The Dublin City University group participated in the monolingual, bilingual and multilingual retrieval tasks this year. The main focus of our investigation this year was extending our retrieval system to document languages other than English, and completing the multilingual task comprising four languages: English, French, Russian and Finnish. Results from our French monolingual experiments indicate that working in French is more effective for retrieval than adopting document and topic translation to English. However, comparison of our multilingual retrieval results using different topic and document translation reveals that this result does not extend to retrieved list merging for the multilingual task in a simple predictable way

Different but equally plausible narratives of policy transformation: A plea for theoretical pluralism

Theories of institutional change help us to understand policy transformation, and provide us with a framework for presenting transformation narratives retrospectively. By telling the transformation narrative of a single case through the lenses of three different institutional change theories, this article highlights the potential shortcomings of a single lens, and the value of using complementary lenses. It argues for a pluralist approach to provide a richer understanding of policy transformation