The Power of the Interpreter in the Business Domain: A CDA Approach to the Professional Interpreter’s Mediating Role

This study explores current practices in business interpreting in China with the aim of identifying the power of the interpreter from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Given the dramatic increase in trade and economic exchanges between China and Western countries, business dialogue interpreting is the most frequently adopte d type of interpreting in China. Cross cultural business negotiation, with its intricate nature and fluctuating dynamics, is highly relevant to its social and situational context. Universally recognized professional norms and interpreter codes of conduct a re not always applicable. This study proposes the following hypothesis: when practicing in a business scenario, the interpreter has power (defined as “control”) derived from linguistic, social, and cultural resources that are unavailable to others in the discourse. Conceptualizing the interpreted business encounter as a discursive practice, the study examines data selected from authentic, naturally occurring business interpreting events in China. The research draws on CDA theory to explore the power of the interpreter, looking at how the actual role of the interpreter deconstructs a shared fiction of interpreters as invisible, detached, and totally neutral in such discourse through the use of scarce bilingual and bicultural resources. Fairclough’s (1989) three dimensional CDA model consists of description, interpretation and explanation. The model makes empirical examination of the interpreter’s power in specific discourse possible by allowing for transcript analysis across different dimensions and levels. This research makes an innovative contribution to the field by integrating CDA theory with theories of social and Interpreting studies, such as Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and Wadensjö’s (1998) typologies. It adapts relevant methodology to examine how the interpreter’s power was established and enacted. The power of interpreter is represented in the capacity to exhibit ownership and accountability when taking individual decisions and actions to influence the development of the dialogue. This capacity is explored primarily in terms of following three categories: the variation of renditions, personal pronoun shifts, and the management of turn taking within the discursive practice of business interpreting. The results show that when performing in the context of business negotiation interpreting, the interpreter assumes a substantial role. This role disrupts a prescribed, idealized image of the interpreter as invisible and totally neutral within the activity of interpreting. Interviews with interpreters then explore their awareness of power as well as how their intervening behaviors and shifts in subject position are influenced by the situational and social context of business negotiations. The role of the interpreter within the setting of business negotiations is uncharted territory in Interpreting Studies. This study aims to improve interpreter awareness of their actual role and subject position in the domain of business. It also carries the potential to enhance the quality of pedagogical practice and the effectiveness of interpreter mediated business meetings

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers

Bioinformatics

This book is divided into different research areas relevant in Bioinformatics such as biological networks, next generation sequencing, high performance computing, molecular modeling, structural bioinformatics, molecular modeling and intelligent data analysis. Each book section introduces the basic concepts and then explains its application to problems of great relevance, so both novice and expert readers can benefit from the information and research works presented here

Mass & secondary structure propensity of amino acids explain their mutability and evolutionary replacements

Why is an amino acid replacement in a protein accepted during evolution? The answer given by bioinformatics relies on the frequency of change of each amino acid by another one and the propensity of each to remain unchanged. We propose that these replacement rules are recoverable from the secondary structural trends of amino acids. A distance measure between high-resolution Ramachandran distributions reveals that structurally similar residues coincide with those found in substitution matrices such as BLOSUM: Asn Asp, Phe Tyr, Lys Arg, Gln Glu, Ile Val, Met → Leu; with Ala, Cys, His, Gly, Ser, Pro, and Thr, as structurally idiosyncratic residues. We also found a high average correlation (\overline{R} R = 0.85) between thirty amino acid mutability scales and the mutational inertia (I X ), which measures the energetic cost weighted by the number of observations at the most probable amino acid conformation. These results indicate that amino acid substitutions follow two optimally-efficient principles: (a) amino acids interchangeability privileges their secondary structural similarity, and (b) the amino acid mutability depends directly on its biosynthetic energy cost, and inversely with its frequency. These two principles are the underlying rules governing the observed amino acid substitutions. © 2017 The Author(s)

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes