1,269 research outputs found

    Evasive offenses: Linguistic limits to the detection of hate speech

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    As long as we have attempted to sanction untoward speech, others have devised strategies for expressing themselves while dodging such sanctions. In this intervention, I review the arms race between technological filters designed to curb hate speech, and evasive language practices designed to avoid detection by these filters. I argue that, following important advances in the detection of relatively overt uses of hate speech, further advances will need to address hate speech that relies on culturally or situationally available context knowledge and linguistic ambiguities to convey its intended offenses. Resolving such forms of hate speech not only poses increasingly unreasonable demands on available data and technologies, but does so for limited, uncertain gains, as many evasive uses of language effectively defy unique valid classification

    La traduzione specializzata all’opera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.

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    Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The “Language Toolkit – Le lingue straniere al servizio dell’internazionalizzazione dell’impresa” project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (ForlĂŹ Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (ForlĂŹ-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices

    Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

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    Synopsis: This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee

    On Embodied Use of Recognitional Demonstratives

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    This study focuses on embodied uses of recognitional demonstratives. While multimodal conversation analytic studies have shown how gesture and speech interact in the elaboration of exophoric references, little attention has been given to the multimodal configuration of other types of referential actions. Based on a video-recorded corpus of professional meetings held in French, this qualitative study shows that a subtype of deictic references, namely recognitional references, are frequently associated with iconic gestures, thus challenging the traditional distinction between exophoric and endophoric uses of deixis

    I march to the beat of my own drum : A critical discourse analysis on mediated construction of Aaron Rodgers\u27 COVID-19 vaccination disclosure

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    The COVID-19 pandemic has brought suffering throughout society and disruption throughout the sports world. In the U.S., there have been politically polarized debates about the best course of action for handling the pandemic, including vaccinations and the appropriateness of other restrictive measures. Amidst the 2021 National Football League (NFL) season, in which the league imposed differing levels of restrictions based on a player’s vaccination status, former MVP and Super Bowl champion Aaron Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19. After his positive test, Rodgers, who had previously claimed he was “immunized” from COVID-19, revealed that his immunization protocol consisted of “alternate” drugs (e.g., ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine) rather than an FDA-approved vaccine. In defense of his decision to “march to the beat of [his] own drum,” Rodgers cast himself as a victim of the “woke mob” and “cancel culture” (McAfee, 2021a). To understand how Aaron Rodgers, a representative of white masculinity, was constructed in mediated coverage, I used critical discourse analysis, examining 302 articles from the most-visited mainstream and sport media websites. The theoretical guides for the study included critical white studies (Akom, 2008; Delgado & Stefancic, 1997; Nayak, 2007) and gender performativity theories (Anderson, 2008; Butler, 1990). Five prominent themes were identified: Dishonesty and Irresponsibility, White Orthodox Sensibilities, White Victimization, Scientific Evidence, and Protection of White Male Hegemony. My themes argue that Rodgers was criticized heavily by most media outlets for his alternative vaccination comments through performing his masculinity in unapproved ways that did not match the norms of the “sport ethic” (Hughes & Coakley, 1991), components of “warrior” masculinity, and a communal version of masculinity. However, some discourses of orthodox masculine notions, such as heterosexuality, toughness, and confidence, were emphasized. Rodgers chose to position himself as a victim, which matches some common conservative ideological strategies in U.S. discourse (Banet-Weiser, 2021; Kusz, 2019). Such insight is useful to understand backlash politics that position white men as victims of social progress by marginalized groups. As the ways in which public figures use victimization rhetoric shifts, researchers should continue to focus on the ways in which power is (re)produced in mediated discourse

    Family Talk: Deontic Rights and Initiating Interaction in Domestic Space

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    This thesis investigates the initiation of talk-in-interaction within domestic space. Using the research methods of Conversation Analysis (CA), I examine the practices family members use to initiate social interaction and explore the claims to, and displays of, entitlement and authority within these sequences of action. Using naturally occurring data recorded over a span of 100 days for the 2008 fly-on-the-wall documentary television series, The Family, I examine the production of summonses, greetings, and the deployment of interrogatives to implement suggestions and complaints, and their responses. This analysis focusses on both the sequential and social implications of initiating sequences of talk-in-interaction, specifically examining actions produced in and around doorway thresholds within the home, for instance, a summons deployed at a closed bedroom door, or a greeting produced after coming home or coming into a room. Through the use of linguistic and bodily resources, parties construct their turns-at-talk as more or less deontically entitled: firstly, through directing their own or another’s current and future actions; and secondly, in the determination of what is or is not appropriate regarding current or previous (in)actions. Furthermore, through the initiating actions they implement and the deontic entitlements they claim, parties negotiate and display their orientations to theirs and their co-participant’s claimed identity and social roles, as well as manage their relationships with one another. All together, this study shows how deontic claims to authority and entitlement are displayed and managed by interlocutors in initiating sequences, and how the interplay of the physical space with verbal and embodied resources shapes their subsequent trajectory

    Analyzing Challenges in Neural Machine Translation for Software Localization

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    Trustworthy Formal Natural Language Specifications

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    Interactive proof assistants are computer programs carefully constructed to check a human-designed proof of a mathematical claim with high confidence in the implementation. However, this only validates truth of a formal claim, which may have been mistranslated from a claim made in natural language. This is especially problematic when using proof assistants to formally verify the correctness of software with respect to a natural language specification. The translation from informal to formal remains a challenging, time-consuming process that is difficult to audit for correctness. This paper shows that it is possible to build support for specifications written in expressive subsets of natural language, within existing proof assistants, consistent with the principles used to establish trust and auditability in proof assistants themselves. We implement a means to provide specifications in a modularly extensible formal subset of English, and have them automatically translated into formal claims, entirely within the Lean proof assistant. Our approach is extensible (placing no permanent restrictions on grammatical structure), modular (allowing information about new words to be distributed alongside libraries), and produces proof certificates explaining how each word was interpreted and how the sentence's structure was used to compute the meaning. We apply our prototype to the translation of various English descriptions of formal specifications from a popular textbook into Lean formalizations; all can be translated correctly with a modest lexicon with only minor modifications related to lexicon size.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2205.0781
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