Advanced Speech Communication System for Deaf People

This paper describes the development of an Advanced Speech Communication System for Deaf People and its field evaluation in a real application domain: the renewal of Driver’s License. The system is composed of two modules. The first one is a Spanish into Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española) translation module made up of a speech recognizer, a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). The second module is a Spoken Spanish generator from sign writing composed of a visual interface (for specifying a sequence of signs), a language translator (for generating the sequence of words in Spanish), and finally, a text to speech converter. For language translation, the system integrates three technologies: an example based strategy, a rule based translation method and a statistical translator. This paper also includes a detailed description of the evaluation carried out in the Local Traffic Office in the city of Toledo (Spain) involving real government employees and deaf people. This evaluation includes objective measurements from the system and subjective information from questionnaire

Developing Better Non-English Materials: Understanding the Limits of Translation

Presents lessons learned from demonstration sites on the challenges of providing non-English material for patients with limited English proficiency, including misconceptions about translation and lack of effective evaluation methods. Recommends solutions

An overview of the research evidence on ethnicity and communication in healthcare

• The aim of the present study was to identify and review the available research evidence on 'ethnicity and communication' in areas relevant to ensuring effective provision of mainstream services (e.g. via interpreter, advocacy and translation services); provision of services targeted on communication (e.g. speech and language therapy, counselling, psychotherapy); consensual/ participatory activities (e.g. consent to interventions), and; procedures for managing and planning for linguistic diversity

Bolaño against Babel: multilingualism, translation and narration in 2666, ‘La parte de los críticos’

This article examines the first part of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 with regard to the strategy of telling a multilingual story in a monolingual narrative. Discussing the motives behind, and implications of, this flattening of the text’s linguistic surface, it argues that to dismiss the tension between story and discourse as a defect is to overlook one of the novel’s principal proposals and to deny a key aspect of Bolaño’s narrative poetics. The article shows that in ‘La parte de los criticos’, effortless communication is confined to a utopian communicative space, which provides a level playing field for characters from different cultural-linguistic backgrounds. The novel’s approach to multilingualism and translation, for which Bolaño may have found support in his readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggests that to him, languages matter not for what separates them but for what they have in common as a generic means of communication. The article contends that the novel’s linguistic flatness is programmatic, exposing to ridicule narratives that claim to represent reality faithfully. In place of the myriad real-world problems of Babel, Bolaño sets an ideal of linguistic transparency and perfect translatability made possible by way of literature

Gendering translation: the 'female voice' in postcolonial Senegal

Using observations from translation theorists such as George Steiner, this article questions whether women's education in Senegal and separate male/female pools of communication have resulted in the development of distinct forms of writing. It examines extracts from texts by female Senegalese writers such as Mariama Bâ, Awa Ndiaye, and Ndeye Coumba Mbengue Diakhate in light of cultural and linguistic research, exploring the ways in which we can apply knowledge of Senegalese societies to our understanding of a text in pre-translation analysis. Along with extracts from both published and unpublished, new translations, the article also explores the way in which a translator may use research such as this to inform the translation process