Translating from English into Indonesian: Which techniques to teach EFL students to be professional translators?

The credits for translation courses offered at the study program of English Language Teaching at a university level in Indonesia are very limited, which is not sufficient to teach and facilitate practices for all techniques of translation. Therefore, the students should only be taught techniques frequently used in translation from English to Indonesian. This research was to analyze translation techniques commonly used in translating from English to Indonesian. The data were collected from Colors magazine, an in-flight magazine for Garuda Indonesia. The magazine comes in two languages. The sentences were extracted, and translated sentences in Indonesian were compared to the original version in English. The research results showed that the most frequently used techniques in translating from English into Indonesian are amplification (23.36%), reduction (15.20%), transposition (12.32%), borrowing (12%), modulation (11.68%), and literal translation (10.08%). Therefore, it is recommended that lecturers teaching students majoring English Language Teaching provide them with those techniques of translations with practices, feedbacks and explicit instruction for revisions

International R&M/Safety Cooperation Lessons Learned Between NASA and JAXA

Presented are a number of important experiences gained and lessons learned from the collaboration of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on the CoNNeCT (Communications, Navigation, and Networking re-Configurable Testbed) project. Both space agencies worked on the CoNNeCT Project to design, assemble, test, integrate, and launch a communications testbed facility mounted onto the International Space Station (ISS) truss. At the 2012 RAMS, two papers about CoNNeCT were presented: one on Ground Support Equipment Reliability & System Safety, and the other one on combined application of System Safety & Reliability for the flight system. In addition to the logistics challenges present when two organizations are on the opposite side of the world, there is also a language barrier. The language barrier encompasses not only the different alphabet, it encompasses the social interactions; these were addressed by techniques presented in the paper. The differences in interpretation and application of Spaceflight Requirements will be discussed in this paper. Although many, but definitely not all, of JAXA's Spaceflight Requirements were inspired by NASA, there were significant and critically important differences in how they were interpreted and applied. This paper intends to summarize which practices worked and which did not for an international collaborative effort so that future missions may benefit from our experiences. The CoNNeCT flight system has been successfully assembled, integrated, tested, shipped, launched and installed on the ISS without incident. This demonstrates that the steps taken to facilitate international understanding, communication, and coordination were successful and warrant discussion as lessons learned

Judging LLM-as-a-judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena

Evaluating large language model (LLM) based chat assistants is challenging due to their broad capabilities and the inadequacy of existing benchmarks in measuring human preferences. To address this, we explore using strong LLMs as judges to evaluate these models on more open-ended questions. We examine the usage and limitations of LLM-as-a-judge, such as position and verbosity biases and limited reasoning ability, and propose solutions to migrate some of them. We then verify the agreement between LLM judges and human preferences by introducing two benchmarks: MT-bench, a multi-turn question set; and Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced battle platform. Our results reveal that strong LLM judges like GPT-4 can match both controlled and crowdsourced human preferences well, achieving over 80\% agreement, the same level of agreement between humans. Hence, LLM-as-a-judge is a scalable and explainable way to approximate human preferences, which are otherwise very expensive to obtain. Additionally, we show our benchmark and traditional benchmarks complement each other by evaluating several variants of LLaMA/Vicuna. We will publicly release 80 MT-bench questions, 3K expert votes, and 30K conversations with human preferences from Chatbot Arena

Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights in Mexico

[Excerpt] The Solidarity Center is launching a new series, Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights. This series follows the May 2003 publication of the Solidarity Center’s groundbreaking Justice for All: A Guide to Worker Rights in the Global Economy. Through powerful first-person narratives, the reports thoroughly examine worker rights, country by country, in today’s global economy. This first report, by renowned worker rights researcher Lance Compa, takes a hard look at Mexico’s century-long fight for independent, democratic trade unions and social justice. Compa puts Mexico’s labor law and practice to the test against international worker rights standards reflected in International Labor Organization conventions and the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work