An Empirical Simulation-based Study of Real-Time Speech Translation for Multilingual Global Project Teams

ABSTRACT Context: Real-time speech translation technology is today available but still lacks a complete understanding of how such technology may affect communication in global software projects. Goal: To investigate the adoption of combining speech recognition and machine translation in order to overcome language barriers among stakeholders who are remotely negotiating software requirements. Method: We performed an empirical simulation-based study including: Google Web Speech API and Google Translate service, two groups of four subjects, speaking Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, and a test set of 60 technical and non-technical utterances. Results: Our findings revealed that, overall: (i) a satisfactory accuracy in terms of speech recognition was achieved, although significantly affected by speaker and utterance differences; (ii) adequate translations tend to follow accurate transcripts, meaning that speech recognition is the most critical part for speech translation technology. Conclusions: Results provide a positive albeit initial evidence towards the possibility to use speech translation technologies to help globally distributed team members to communicate in their native languages

UmobiTalk: Ubiquitous Mobile Speech Based Learning Language Translator for Sesotho Language

Published ThesisThe need to conserve the under-resourced languages is becoming more urgent as some of them are becoming extinct; natural language processing can be used to redress this. Currently, most initiatives around language processing technologies are focusing on western languages such as English and French, yet resources for such languages are already available. The Sesotho language is one of the under-resourced Bantu languages; it is mostly spoken in Free State province of South Africa and in Lesotho. Like other parts of South Africa, Free State has experienced high number of migrants and non-Sesotho speakers from neighboring provinces and countries; such people are faced with serious language barrier problems especially in the informal settlements where everyone tends to speak only Sesotho. Non-Sesotho speakers refers to the racial groups such as Xhosas, Zulus, Coloureds, Whites and more, in which Sesotho language is not their native language. As a solution to this, we developed a parallel corpus that has English as source and Sesotho as a target language and packaged it in UmobiTalk - Ubiquitous mobile speech based learning translator. UmobiTalk is a mobile-based tool for learning Sesotho for English speakers. The development of this tool was based on the combination of automatic speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis

Sound and control in Welsh poetry (c. 1300-c. 1600)

This thesis connects the fields of sound studies and medieval Welsh history and literature. In doing so, it argues two related points. Firstly, by using the poetry of ‘Beirdd yr Uchelwyr’ (the Poets of the Nobility, c. 1300–c. 1600) as a case study, it demonstrates that much new and nuanced meaning can be unveiled by listening carefully to the sounds represented in a body of medieval literature. In this sense, it is the first attempt to apply the theories and methods of sound studies systematically to literature in a Celtic language. Secondly, in assessing some of these new meanings, it shows the relevance of several aspects of medieval scientific thought concerning sound, especially the importance of controlling ‘sound’ lest it become ‘noise’; meaningful sound was controlled sound. It argues that Welsh poets’ concern with control was partly a reaction to social and environmental change. Poets felt threatened by aspects of colonisation, urbanisation, and mechanisation caused by the Edwardian Conquest, and wider European trends. Anxious that patrons were turning elsewhere, poets emphasised the exceptionalism of their controlled and refined Welsh, especially their strict-metre poetry. This anxiety was projected onto the wider auditory world. Acceptable sounds – holy bellringing, the Latin language, beautiful harps – were described in terms of control, while unacceptable noises – minstrels, foreign vernaculars, crwth music – were described in terms of disorder. Overall, this thesis argues for the importance of listening to all aspects of premodern literature, particularly the highly aural poetry of medieval Wales. Before industrialised, mechanised, and electrified sounds, and before sight became the primary means to access truth and knowledge, hearing was just as important as seeing. An aural-sensitive reading reveals several new meanings in this body of poetry produced by anxious and conservative listeners attempting to control a changing world with a changing place for poets

Beauty and Esthetics. Meanings of an Idea and Concept of the Senses. An Introduction to an Esthetic Communication Concept Facing the Perspectives Of Its Theory, History, and Cultural Traditions of the Beautiful.

When we ask for the definitions and forms of esthetics from a post-modern perspective, we must take into account that the perspective today is a re-constructive one allowing us to trace back historically, but also allowing various forms of research such as empirical research, or quantitative and qualitative research. This book is devided into chapters. Each of them has a different approach towards esthetics according to the definition of esthetics as a theoretical field, esthetics as a phenomenon of beauty, and esthetics as a specific phenomenon in a certain cultural context. We will focus on the contemporary state of research regarding esthetics from branches of the humanities and natural sciences. Our interest here is to join the classical theoretical terminology of esthetics derived from the humanities with contemporary concepts of research also not related to the humanities

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volumes I-IV

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume I provides an introduction and chapters on historical phonology, sandhi and nominal morphology. Volume II describes plural noun morphology, the verb and pronominals. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics. Volume IV presents transcriptions and a CD containing recordings of a slection of speakers across the generations. The final volume also contains a vocabulary, bibliography and four indexes

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volumes I-IV

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume I provides an introduction and chapters on historical phonology, sandhi and nominal morphology. Volume II describes plural noun morphology, the verb and pronominals. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics. Volume IV presents transcriptions and a CD containing recordings of a slection of speakers across the generations. The final volume also contains a vocabulary, bibliography and four indexes

Kind Kit Marlow –or Marely or Merlin: A reading of Anthony Burgess's A dead man in Deptford through the naming conventions applied in the novel

The main concern of my thesis is to provide an account of the stylistic idiosyncrasies observed in the naming of the characters in Anthony Burgess's post-modernist historical novel A Dead Man in Deptford (Vintage, 1994), with special reference to the names applied to its protagonist, the Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe. The interest in naming is occasioned by the salience given to personal names, defined as proper names borne by human or anthropomorphised nominata. Their prominence is the result of two things. First, some names in the novel display a marked tendency to change form so that the same name appears under a variety of spellings, notably the protagonist's family name, Marlowe. Second, some names are frequently foregrounded by being brought into relation with other items on the strength of the formal similarities between them, inducing the reader to assign a meaning to them. This feature particularly affects the short form of Marlowe's forename, Kit, the form he is habitually called by throughout the novel. Names are consequently seen to partake of the instability of the language system, a system in which the features that define it, structure and indeterminacy, exist under tension. The orthographical vagaries names undergo are a source of ambiguity which undermines and subverts the values assigned to them by virtue of the relations they enter into. Their conspicuousness strongly suggests that names are central to the inquiry into the internal contradiction of the language system. Also, as the names most affected by foregrounding are those which identify the main character, the ambiguity surrounding them reflects the problematic concerning the identity of their bearer and the circumstances of the violent and untimely death alluded to in the title of Burgess's novel

An original reaction from art : an analysis of the criticism of A.G. Stephens on the Red page of the Bulletin, 1894-1906

Most of the criticism written by A.G. Stephens is contained in his writings for The Bulletin between 1894 and 1906, and these writings appeared on what is usually referred to as "The Red Page". In fact this description is not quite accurate in that the front covers of the issues of The Bulletin for that period, on the verso of which "The Red Page" appeared, have faded to dull pink and it seems unlikely that they were ever nearer to red than bright pink at the time they were issued. Furthermore "The Red Page" was not so-called until 29 August 1896 although, under other titles, Stephens' work began appearing on the verso of the front cover of The Bulletin on 1 September 1894. In later years several variations of title were introduced, sometimes representing changes in the function of the page, at other times reflecting no more than the editor's whim. For the purposes of this study I have used the Red Page as a generic term to cover the whole period of Stephens' editorship, while attempting to indicate clearly the periods in which other titles were in use. The title, "The Red Page" was certainly the most enduring once Stephens began to use it in August 1896

Re-articulating tradition, translating place : collective memories of Carnival in Leeds and Bristol.

This thesis offers an ethnographic perspective on `African-Caribbean' Carnivals in Leeds (Chapeltown) and Bristol (St. Paul's), based on an integration of in-depth interviews, focus groups, archival analysis and participatory research. It demonstrates how globalized diasporic meanings are localized in and through the specificities of `place'. Rather than employing an exclusively textual method of deconstruction, which has dominated much of the academic work on Carnival, this research draws on participatory experience in social spaces such as mas camps, Carnival costume-making classes and singing groups to explore the practices through which Carnival is reconstituted. The thesis shows how these practices involve performances of different and contested collective memories, where individual participants react to and recreate these `unified' senses of tradition in very different ways (ranging from those who insist on a `Carnival tradition' based on walking mas and soca/calypso music, to those who celebrate a `mas by other means' through the rhythms of jungle and hip hop and `costumes' of branded sportswear and puffa jackets). Music and mas provide key examples of the emergence and re-articulation of complex and contested identities. Though hybrid in form and apparently `progressive' in sentiment, such forms and their related `new ethnicities' are shown to involve exclusions as well as inclusions, as they are patterned by the continued salience of `racialized difference'. The thesis therefore raises questions about how collective memories are actively reconstructed through their relations with the multiple spatialities of a `sense of place', and how racisms persist in influencing the meanings of `multicultural' events such as Carnival