Benefits of Ontologies to Multilingual Needs

The way in which multilingual information is organized and presented, accounts for its usefulness or adequacy for a specific purpose. As globalization becomes more pervasive, people all over the world need to make use of information in different languages in their everyday work. Bilingual or multilingual dictionaries have been, and still are, relevant resources for facing up multilingual issues. However, the multilingual information collected in dictionaries remains insufficient for those people who need to gain a general view of a specific parcel of knowledge in two or more languages. In LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) this issue becomes even more relevant. In the case of translation of specialized texts, specialization on source and target subject matter becomes imperative in order to get a complete understanding of the source text and transfer that knowledge to the target reader. Ontologies may come to solve this knowledge acquisition problem, since they offer a multilingual conceptualization of a specific parcel of knowledge by organizing the information according to the different and various relations between concepts. In this way, translators are able to gain the required domain knowledge, as well as the type of equivalence relations between concepts in the different languages, and their context of use. Thus, pursue of this paper is to give an overview of the benefits of multilingual ontologies to the multilingual information retrieval

English in the Urban Linguistic Landscape from Lingua Franca to Lingua Symbol

The main aim of this article is to offer a brief overview of various recent studies that have dealt with multilingualism in the urban linguistic landscape (according to Landry/Bourhis), in Europe and in the rest of the world, with special emphasis on the results regarding English. English is today considered the quintessential lingua franca, in that it is almost constantly and variously present in the linguistic landscape in many cities in the world, from store signs to directions for tourists, from messages in shop windows to commercial billboards. The studies discussed, in addition to confirming this role as lingua franca, highlight the growing use of English as a language symbolic of globalization, multiculturalism and prestige

Understanding the hobbit: the cross-national and cross-linguistic reception of a global media product in Belgium, France and the Netherlands

The Hobbit franchise, as many global media products, reaches audiences worldwide. Audience members apparently consume a uniform media product. But do they? The World Hobbit Project offers a new and exciting opportunity to explore differences and similarities, for it provides us with audiences' understandings of the trilogy across languages and nationalities. In this paper we conduct a statistical analysis on differences and similarities in understandings of The Hobbit trilogy between Belgium, the Netherlands, and France – both in what audiences do and do not feel The Hobbit films to be. Analyzing this particular region in Europe provides an extraordinary opportunity, for The World Hobbit project allows us to compare on the language level (the Dutch and French-speaking Belgian regions with respectively the Netherlands and France), as well as on the level of national identities (comparing the three countries amongst each other). In doing so, we are able to further understand what informs geographical and linguistic differences in the consumption of a uniform media product. As such, this paper touches upon cultural hegemony, cross-border flows of fiction, language and cultural proximity

Diversity, competition, extinction: the ecophysics of language change

As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of information exchanges and communicative constraints in groups of agents under selective scenarios. These models have been very helpful in providing a rationale on how complex forms of communication emerge under evolutionary pressures. However, other patterns of large-scale organization can be described using mathematical methods ignoring communicative traits. These approaches consider shorter time scales and have been developed by exploiting both theoretical ecology and statistical physics methods. The models are reviewed here and include extinction, invasion, origination, spatial organization, coexistence and diversity as key concepts and are very simple in their defining rules. Such simplicity is used in order to catch the most fundamental laws of organization and those universal ingredients responsible for qualitative traits. The similarities between observed and predicted patterns indicate that an ecological theory of language is emerging, supporting (on a quantitative basis) its ecological nature, although key differences are also present. Here we critically review some recent advances lying and outline their implications and limitations as well as open problems for future research.Comment: 17 Pages. A review on current models from statistical Physics and Theoretical Ecology applied to study language dynamic