Interactions between text chat and audio modalities for L2 communication and feedback in the synthetic world Second Life.

This paper reports on a study of the interactions between text chat and audio modalities in L2 interaction in a synthetic (virtual) world and observes whether the text chat modality was used for corrective feedback and the characteristics of the latter. This is examined within the context of a hybrid Content and Language Integrated Learning design workshop. This course involved 17 students of architecture whose L2 was either French or English and for which the synthetic world environment Second Life was employed for distance language sessions. Using multimodal transcriptions of the interaction data from these sessions, it was found that text chat was employed for content-based interaction concerning the task as well as feedback concerning non-target-like errors in the audio modality. Feedback predominantly concerned lexical errors and was offered in the form of recasts. The multimodality of the environment did not appear to cognitively overload students who frequently responded in the audio modality to corrective feedback offered in the text chat. The study highlights the need to train language tutors who wish to exploit synthetic worlds to use the text chat in parallel with the audio to support learners' verbal production with respect to verbal participation and proficiency

Multimodal Interpretation Studies in China

In recent years, interpretation researchers have gradually realized the multimodal nature of interpretation and begun to observe and analyze interpretation activities from a multimodal perspective. This article analyzes high-quality articles on China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from 2012 to 2021 on the topic of multimodal interpretation. It clarifies the current status of multimodal interpretation research in China from three aspects: annual publication volume, main authors, and research hotspots. It also finds that related research has problems such as a small number of publications, a lack of high-quality articles, a single research scope and perspective, and misconceptions. Suggestions were put forward, including clarifying the concept of multimodal interpretation and improving theoretical construction, promoting interdisciplinary research and cooperation, and providing more empirical evidence in order to provide reference for the further development of multimodal interpretation research

Corpus-Based Research on Chinese Language and Linguistics

This volume collects papers presenting corpus-based research on Chinese language and linguistics, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The contributions cover different fields of linguistics, including syntax and pragmatics, semantics, morphology and the lexicon, sociolinguistics, and corpus building. There is now considerable emphasis on the reliability of linguistic data: the studies presented here are all grounded in the tenet that corpora, intended as collections of naturally occurring texts produced by a variety of speakers/writers, provide a more robust, statistically significant foundation for linguistic analysis. The volume explores not only the potential of using corpora as tools allowing access to authentic language material, but also the challenges involved in corpus interrogation, analysis, and building

Evaluation of Michael Berry’s Translation of To Live from Metafunctional Approach

Standing distinctively out from his other works, To Live signifies the sharp turning of Yu Hua’s writing style from avant-garde experimenting to the mature novel narrating. The English Version To Live translated by the American scholar Michael Berry made its appearance in 2003, winning generous appreciation of the American readers from all walks of life. Compared with the extensive study conducted on the original text, the study of the English version, especially its C-E translation, is relatively few and limited. To assess the C-E translation of the novel, the thesis adopts a feasible approach from systemic functional linguistics—metafunction theory. Based on the three metafunctions, this paper makes a detailed comparative study between the original text and its corresponding translation so as to find out the merits and demerits of the C-E translation as well as the underlying causes. This thesis makes an objective study of the C-E translation of the English version, intending to provide constructive reference for the objective judgment of Berry’s version as well as the improvement of the future translation

Maintaining Source Language in Translating Holy Book: A Case of Translating Al-Qur‟an into Indonesian

Translation involves two or more languages in practice. This undoubtedly activates the conflict between the source and target language. When translator tries to help readers understand fully the concept of the source text, he will sacrifice the source language to maintain the target. In this terms translator will have diffciculties to balance between those two languages. Maintaining both is much more problematic in tranlsation practice. Shifting between theories of translations does not automatically help translator to mantain the contents of the text tranfered into target language. Distorting as well as inserting translator‘s idea then is impossible to avoid. Mastering culture, history, sociology an many other disciplines in both source and target language will then help very much the action of translating. The next problem then occurs if it is related to law and religious teaching. Since holy text is sacredly honoured by the believers, translator is potentially sentenced to be sinful and to lose his profession. The alternative solutions are leaving the original text (Arabic) put side by side with the translation, undertaking borrowing and calque, and annotating on the target text

Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths

The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend arises from an independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths, i.e. sentences with shorter dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We are able to reject the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of language.Comment: the discussion section has been expanded significantly; in press in Complexity (Wiley

Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters

Writing assistance is an application closely related to human life and is also a fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) research field. Its aim is to improve the correctness and quality of input texts, with character checking being crucial in detecting and correcting wrong characters. From the perspective of the real world where handwriting occupies the vast majority, characters that humans get wrong include faked characters (i.e., untrue characters created due to writing errors) and misspelled characters (i.e., true characters used incorrectly due to spelling errors). However, existing datasets and related studies only focus on misspelled characters mainly caused by phonological or visual confusion, thereby ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult. To break through this dilemma, we present Visual-C$^3$, a human-annotated Visual Chinese Character Checking dataset with faked and misspelled Chinese characters. To the best of our knowledge, Visual-C$^3$ is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. Additionally, we also propose and evaluate novel baseline methods on Visual-C$^3$. Extensive empirical results and analyses show that Visual-C$^3$ is high-quality yet challenging. The Visual-C$^3$ dataset and the baseline methods will be publicly available to facilitate further research in the community.Comment: Work in progres