Challenges of metarepresentation to translation competence.

One of the outcomes of the inferential framework of communication developed by Sperber and Wilson (1995) is the pursuit of competence-oriented research on translation (CORT), as proposed in Gutt 2000. CORT focuses on the discovery of the mental capabilities involved in the translation task.\ud \ud One of the key concepts recently being explored in the inferential framework is that of metarepresentation. It involves the capability of people to represent in their minds not only the external world but the thoughts (mental representations) other people entertain about that world. Metarepresentations can involve several levels of embedding: thus persons can metarepresent to themselves the thoughts of others about their own thoughts about a certain subject matter etc.\ud \ud While metarepresentation is an important mental faculty for successful communication in general, it is of eminent importance in the translation task where the translator may have to metarepresent several different worlds of thoughts (cognitive environments) and their interaction with one another as mutual cognitive environments in cross-cultural communication events.\ud \ud This paper first briefly outlines the inferential model of translation, including the notions of cognitive environment, context and metarepresentation. The main part of the paper surveys five distinct constellations of mutual cognitive environments found in translation situations. The first – and ideal – constellation is where original author, translator and receptor audience all share essentially the same mutual cognitive environment. More commonly, however, this condition is not fulfilled and the other four constellations can present considerable challenges to the metarepresentational capabilities of the translator. Furthermore, the translator needs to develop strategies that will overcome differences in cognitive environment that would negatively affect the communication process. (This is in addition to the task of overcoming problems caused by language differences.) Suggestions are made about directions in which these problems, which can seriously undermine the success of the translated text, can be sought.\ud \ud References\ud Gutt, Ernst-August 2000 Translation and relevance: Cognition and context. Manchester: St. Jerome.\ud Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.\u

MPICH-G2: A Grid-Enabled Implementation of the Message Passing Interface

Application development for distributed computing "Grids" can benefit from tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations, are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms. We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance results, and review application experiences, including record-setting distributed simulations.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Internationalizing education: evaluating the growth of intercultural communication and competency in students through an international negotiation project using an online law office

Graduates will need to be able to recognize and appreciate culture in a way that minimizes conflict, promote understanding and to establish a relationship of trust and confidence. The need for competency in intercultural communication and an awareness of ethical challenges sets out a challenge for academics. This study examines the types of learning and characteristics developed by students when working on a ten‐week international negotiation project. It questions whether the study was an effective learning tool to raise consciousness of cultural diversity and effectively address the ‘stumbling blocks’ identified in intercultural communication. Using the findings from this, the study will consider the factors academics should consider when designing high quality, equitable and global study programmes in order for students to develop cross‐cultural capacities and aptitudes in order to be able to perform, professionally and socially, in a multicultural environment

Public relations professionals’ perspectives on the communication challenges and opportunities they face in the U.S. public sector

This study reports common challenges and opportunities 49 government public relations professionals face in the United States of America (U.S.) when communicating internally and externally. Following on from the primary public sector attributes proposed by Liu and Horsley (2007), the in-depth interviews revealed 13 common attributes that affected government communication practices. The study’s findings are useful for practitioners entering the government communication field in the U.S. and elsewhere, practitioners in other sectors who collaborate with government communicators, and academics developing communication theory for the under-researched public sector

The Relevance-Based Model of Context in Processing Puns

While the essential role context plays in the understanding of expressions and utterances has never been questioned, the way it is perceived has evolved from a static factor established prior to the process of utterance interpretation, indeed a prerequisite for processing information, to a dynamic entity which emerges in this process. The latter view is espoused by relevance theorists, who define context as “the set of premises used in interpreting an utterance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95: 15) and treat it as a mental construct undergoing diverse modifications as the comprehender of an utterance processes and interprets incoming verbal information and other communicative signals supplied by the communicator. The aim of this paper is to consider the usefulness of this model of context for analyzing the derivation of meaning in puns, i.e. utterances in which, instead of its usual function of allowing the comprehender to resolve ambiguities ubiquitous in language and communication, the context plays a different role of leading him to entertain, and often to accept two diverse readings[…

Adjusting process count on demand for petascale global optimization⋆

There are many challenges that need to be met before efficient and reliable computation at the petascale is possible. Many scientific and engineering codes running at the petascale are likely to be memory intensive, which makes thrashing a serious problem for many petascale applications. One way to overcome this challenge is to use a dynamic number of processes, so that the total amount of memory available for the computation can be increased on demand. This paper describes modifications made to the massively parallel global optimization code pVTdirect in order to allow for a dynamic number of processes. In particular, the modified version of the code monitors memory use and spawns new processes if the amount of available memory is determined to be insufficient. The primary design challenges are discussed, and performance results are presented and analyzed

Improving Communications: Awareness and Management of Perceiving Disagreement

Interpersonal communications often fail to communicate the intended message. Language, contextual, and cultural differences between the sender and receiver of the message influence the receipt of the intended message exacerbates a lack of understanding when the message contains inexact words and phrases. The resultant message obtained by the receiver may or may not be in agreement with what the intended message was supposed to convey. This creates a phenomenon named Perceiving Disagreement. When Perceiving Disagreement occurs, actions taken because of the message can conflict with the intended actions expected by the message sender and result in inappropriate performance and behaviors. This paper discusses the phenomenon of Perceiving Disagreement and encourages organizations and individuals to support the use of awareness training and practice of using more exact language and exchanging feedback between the receiver and sender of a message to improve the understanding and effectiveness of all communications. This is particularly important when using intervening media and translators for international communications.Communications; Perception; Disagreement; Conflict; Awareness; Outcomes; Understanding.

Communicator, Feb. 2009

Volume 21, Issue