What Makes a Font Persuasive?: An Eye-Tracking Study of Perception in American and Chinese Assessment of Fonts

Professional, technical, and visual communication practitioners and academics have historically overlooked visual rhetoric and how it is employed in business communications as well as how various cultures comprehend and respond to the design elements and visual composition of business documents. More specifically typography, the building blocks of a document, has been little explored in professional and technical communication research. As such, this study utilizes eye-tracking technology in conjunction with other data collection methods to understand if and how fonts contribute to the persuasiveness of business communications and if different cultures vary in typeface assessment and perception. Mackiewicz and Brumberger have both examined typeface anatomy and its effect on perception of font personality. Similar methods are implemented in this study to determine if the anatomical characteristics of fonts contribute to the perception of typeface persuasiveness in business documents. Furthermore, this study also seeks to establish if any correlations exist in typeface persuasiveness between American and Chinese cultures. Through this study, it was discovered that there are in fact anatomical characteristics of typefaces that lend themselves to a font being perceived as persuasive. It was also found that the perception of persuasiveness differs between the two cultures, and the methods by which the two groups assess the typefaces for persuasiveness are quite distinct

The Valuation of User-Generated Content: A Structural, Stylistic and Semantic Analysis of Online Reviews

The ability and ease for users to create and publish content has provided vast amount of online product reviews. However, the amount of data is overwhelmingly large and unstructured, making information difficult to quantify. This creates challenge in understanding how online reviews affect consumers' purchase decisions. In my dissertation, I explore the structural, stylistic and semantic content of online reviews. Firstly, I present a measurement that quantifies sentiments with respect to a multi-point scale and conduct a systematic study on the impact of online reviews on product sales. Using the sentiment metrics generated, I estimate the weight that customers place on each segment of the review and examine how these segments affect the sales for a given product. The results empirically verified that sentiments influence sales, of which ratings alone do not capture. Secondly, I propose a method to detect online review manipulation using writing style analysis and assess how consumers respond to such manipulation. Finally, I find that societal norms have influence on posting behavior and significant differences do exist across cultures. Users should therefore exercise care in interpreting the information from online reviews. This dissertation advances our understanding on the consumer decision making process and shed insight on the relevance of online review ratings and sentiments over a sequential decision making process. Having tapped into the abundant supply of online review data, the results in this work are based on large-scale datasets which extend beyond the scale of traditional word-of-mouth research

Health Misinformation in Search and Social Media

People increasingly rely on the Internet in order to search for and share health-related information. Indeed, searching for and sharing information about medical treatments are among the most frequent uses of online data. While this is a convenient and fast method to collect information, online sources may contain incorrect information that has the potential to cause harm, especially if people believe what they read without further research or professional medical advice. The goal of this thesis is to address the misinformation problem in two of the most commonly used online services: search engines and social media platforms. We examined how people use these platforms to search for and share health information. To achieve this, we designed controlled laboratory user studies and employed large-scale social media data analysis tools. The solutions proposed in this thesis can be used to build systems that better support people's health-related decisions. The techniques described in this thesis addressed online searching and social media sharing in the following manner. First, with respect to search engines, we aimed to determine the extent to which people can be influenced by search engine results when trying to learn about the efficacy of various medical treatments. We conducted a controlled laboratory study wherein we biased the search results towards either correct or incorrect information. We then asked participants to determine the efficacy of different medical treatments. Results showed that people were significantly influenced both positively and negatively by search results bias. More importantly, when the subjects were exposed to incorrect information, they made more incorrect decisions than when they had no interaction with the search results. Following from this work, we extended the study to gain insights into strategies people use during this decision-making process, via the think-aloud method. We found that, even with verbalization, people were strongly influenced by the search results bias. We also noted that people paid attention to what the majority states, authoritativeness, and content quality when evaluating online content. Understanding the effects of cognitive biases that can arise during online search is a complex undertaking because of the presence of unconscious biases (such as the search results ranking) that the think-aloud method fails to show. Moving to social media, we first proposed a solution to detect and track misinformation in social media. Using Zika as a case study, we developed a tool for tracking misinformation on Twitter. We collected 13 million tweets regarding the Zika outbreak and tracked rumors outlined by the World Health Organization and the Snopes fact-checking website. We incorporated health professionals, crowdsourcing, and machine learning to capture health-related rumors as well as clarification communications. In this way, we illustrated insights that the proposed tools provide into potentially harmful information on social media, allowing public health researchers and practitioners to respond with targeted and timely action. From identifying rumor-bearing tweets, we examined individuals on social media who are posting questionable health-related information, in particular those promoting cancer treatments that have been shown to be ineffective. Specifically, we studied 4,212 Twitter users who have posted about one of 139 ineffective ``treatments'' and compared them to a baseline of users generally interested in cancer. Considering features that capture user attributes, writing style, and sentiment, we built a classifier that is able to identify users prone to propagating such misinformation. This classifier achieved an accuracy of over 90%, providing a potential tool for public health officials to identify such individuals for preventive intervention

Plain Language Revision and Insider Audiences: A City Charter Case Study

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2017. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication. Advisor: Lee-Ann Breuch. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 196 pages.This dissertation explores the relationship of plain language—a popular strategy for creating effective, ethical, and cost-effective texts—and audience. Specifically, it examines the impacts of plain language revision on insider and expert audiences in the case of a city charter plain-language revision. Through qualitative analysis and a genre theory approach, I found that the plain language charter affected insiders through various sites of interplay, or residual connections between the old and new charters. Insiders and experts contended with an interplay of charter authorities, as well as an interplay of practices, which included easier individual reading and improved government processes. In addition, through an interplay between genres, the plain language charter affected the form of other texts in the government. This project has implications for technical and professional communication research and practice. It also has implications for rhetorical theory, as the project inquires into what plainness currently is and does for writers and audiences. I explore plainness as a durable rhetorical style type that is currently bound up with an ideology favoring public access and participation in expert spheres. I also take up Devitt’s (2009) call to refigure form and style into studies of genre—a framework that I show is enriching for context-focused research into plain language

Perceived and observed translational norms in biomedical translation in the contemporary Portuguese translation market : a quantitative and qualitative product- and process-oriented study

At the intersection of Descriptive Translation Studies and Social Sciences, this interdisciplinary, empirical, experimental and descriptive study addresses the question of ascertaining whether and to what extent translators’ decision-making processes are influenced by what translators believe to be the expectations of other agents, namely revisers and readers. Whereas preferences by translators have previously been described and explained in the literature, it is still unclear what revisers’ and readers’ translational preferences are and what expectations they have about translators and the translated text. In addition, there is still a lack of understanding about how translators translate, how translators think they should translate, and what translators believe to be the expectations of other translators, revisers, and readers. In order to address these issues, this study focuses on the distinction between observed and perceived norms in the translation of biomedical texts from English to European Portuguese in contemporary Portugal. It zooms in on preferences regarding source and target orientation in translation, comparing both the practice and beliefs of sixty agents with different roles and levels of experience: novice translators, experienced translators, revisers, and health professionals (representing the intended audience of the target text). In particular, the specific question which drives this research is: considering English to European Portuguese biomedical translation in the contemporary Portuguese market, are the observed translational norms and perceived translational norms of translators, revisers and readers similar or different regarding source and target orientation? Mainly informed by the metatheoretical, theoretical, and methodological discussions of Toury (1995, 2012), Hermans (1991; 1996; 1999a; 1999b; 2000), Bicchieri (2006, 2017a, and 2017b), and Rosa (2016c), norms and expectations emerge as a powerful descriptive tool in studying norm-governed behavior and specifically to capture and further understand the complexities of decision-making processes in translation. Based on an exploratory and preliminary case study, this dissertation first sets out to explore the practice of biomedical translation in Portugal to understand who the agents involved in biomedical translation are, what they do, what for, in what types of texts, with what function and for whom. To this end, a mixed corpus of 700,000 words of different text-types of medical and biomedical content translated from English to European Portuguese was analyzed, including e-mail exchanges between translators and project managers. This analysis shows that biomedical translation involves a complex structure of translation agents performing different translation tasks, among which revisers play a pivotal role. The most common text-type identified is instructional texts about medical devices aimed at health professionals. Following this preliminary assessment, for the main study, a mixed methodology based on quantitative and qualitative product- and process-oriented approaches was employed to study (i) thirty translations of an instructional text about a medical device intended for health professionals, (ii) the translational preferences of fifteen revisers and fifteen health professionals regarding the same instructional text, and (iii) the expectations of these translators, revisers, and health professionals about biomedical translation. The experiment involved eliciting data from fifteen novice translators and fifteen experienced translators asked to translate an instructional text. The data included keylogging and screen recording data, interim versions and target texts, and it was triangulated to produce an empirical description of translation phenomena of biomedical content. The data was analyzed in terms of (i) the translators’ translation problems, (ii) the corresponding observed translation solutions, and (iii) the source and target orientation of the solution types. In addition, the thirty translators, together with fifteen specialized revisers and fifteen health professionals, were asked to answer a questionnaire aimed at eliciting different types of beliefs and expectations to (i) analyze the translators’ expectations and perceptions about how they should translate and how other translators, revisers, and readers believe translators should translate, (ii) identify the revisers’ and health professionals’ translational preferences, and (iii) describe an elaborate network of beliefs and expectations affecting the translators’ decision-making processes that result from the interaction of several agents with different roles and levels of normative control, and (iv) to propose explanatory hypotheses for the identified translation phenomena. From the product analysis, the study found that (i) the novice and experienced translators opted for both source- and target-oriented translation solutions, while (ii) the revisers and health professionals opted for the most target-oriented translations. The most common target-oriented translation solutions (i.e., explicitation, implicitation, hyponymy/hypernymy, omission, addition, and other information changes) were also analyzed in terms of their textual function and potential motivations to propose explanatory hypotheses. From the process analysis, the comparison of the translators’ interim versions and final versions indicated that while (i) the novice translators proceeded from less source-oriented versions to more source-oriented ones, (ii) the experienced translators proceeded from more source-oriented versions to less source-oriented ones. From the analysis of the beliefs and expectations, the study found that (i) while the novice and experienced translators described the appropriateness of a translation using both source- and target-oriented criteria, (ii) the revisers and health professionals reported target-oriented criteria as the most important to describe the appropriateness of a translation. Overall, the novice and experienced translators’ behavior and expectations suggested initial norms of source and target orientation, revealing that aspects of both the source and target cultures and languages are valued. The analysis of the processes of the novice and experienced translators also suggested that there are other possible motivations for source and target orientation connected with (i) the number of translation problems and (ii) the time taken to translate the source text. Revisers’ and health professionals’ behavior and expectations suggested an initial norm of target orientation, revealing a higher valuation of the target culture, language, and prospective reader. The study also found that even though accuracy (a source-oriented criterion) is a common expectation among all agents, expectations regarding literal translation (source-oriented), transparency, and invisibility (target-oriented) are not shared by translators, revisers, and health professionals. By showing how perceptions and expectations about source and target orientation may influence translators’ textual regularities, the findings of this descriptive, target-oriented study add to our understanding of translational norms in general and in biomedical translation in particular. The main implications of this study are of four different types: theoretical, methodological, practical and didactic. This study raises theoretical implications that have a bearing on translational norms. In particular, it proposes a definition of translational norms that (i) allows for a distinction between object- and meta-level discourses (building on Rosa 2016c), (ii) explicitly includes the role of agents’ expectations as a driver of behavior, connoting what is considered appropriate and inappropriate (adapted from Bicchieri 2017a), and (iii) stresses the need to address different and sometimes conflicting perceptions of what is considered appropriate and inappropriate in a particular community. In addition, the study also offers methodological tools to address norms by proposing that translational norms can be further studied through the comparative analysis of a detailed taxonomy of beliefs, attitudes, and expectations elicited from different agents with various roles (adapted from Bicchieri 2017a). It also describes how translation problems can be identified based on keylogging and screen recording data through a fine-grained classification of translation units based on primary and secondary indicators of translation problems (building on Krings 1986; and Göpferich 2010b) in order to reconstruct the decision-making processes of the translator and, in particular, the methodological distinction between an interim solution and a consciously postponed decision. The described regularities and expectations expressed by the data also have implications for translation practice and translator training. The findings can be used to develop concrete solutions to address translation competence and best practices for the language industry. It is recommended that students should be specifically trained to raise self-awareness to monitor and assess, in their translation and revision decision-making processes, how their expectations about translation and their perceived expectations about revisers and readers can be related to their translation solutions. Given that communication between professional translators and revisers can be a factor for the distinct perceptions identified regarding expectations, best practices for peer feedback are also proposed. In addition, universities are called to action to promote communication among professional translators, revisers and readers in specialized domains, addressing at the same time the gap between academic work and the language industry.Posicionando-se na intersecção dos Estudos Descritivos de Tradução e das Ciências Sociais, o presente estudo interdisciplinar empírico-experimental aborda a questão da influência dos processos de tomada de decisão dos tradutores pelo que os tradutores acreditam ser as expectativas de outros agentes, nomeadamente se os processos dos tradutores são influenciados pelas expectativas das expectativas de outros tradutores, revisores e leitores e em que medida. Embora as preferências dos tradutores já tenham sido descritas e explicadas na literatura, as preferências tradutórias de revisores e leitores, assim como as suas expectativas referentes aos tradutores e ao texto traduzido, foram ainda pouco abordadas. Uma outra lacuna na literatura diz respeito a como os tradutores traduzem, como os tradutores pensam que deviam traduzir e o que os tradutores acreditam ser as expectativas de outros tradutores, revisores e leitores. Para abordar estas questões, o presente estudo centra-se na distinção entre as actuais normas observadas e as normas presumidas na tradução biomédica no par de línguas inglês-português europeu em Portugal. O foco recai sobre as preferências referentes às culturas e línguas de partida e chegada na tradução, comparando práticas e convicções de sessenta agentes com diferentes cargos e níveis de experiência: tradutores júnior, tradutores experientes, revisores e profissionais de saúde (em representação do público-alvo do texto de chegada). Assim, a questão que norteia esta investigação é: no contexto da tradução biomédica contemporânea no par de línguas inglêsportuguês europeu, serão as normas tradutórias observadas e presumidas de tradutores juniores e experientes, de revisores e de leitores relativamente às culturas e línguas de partida e chegada semelhantes ou diferentes? As normas e as expectativas, fundamentadas pelos debates metateóricos, teóricos e metodológicos principalmente de Toury (1995, 2012), Hermans (1991; 1996; 1999a; 1999b; 2000), Bicchieri (2006, 2017a, and 2017b) e Rosa (2016c), apresentam-se como uma ferramenta descritiva robusta para o estudo do comportamento regido por normas e, em particular, para descrever e aprofundar o conhecimento em relação às complexidades dos processos de tomada de decisão em tradução. Com base num estudo de caso exploratório e preliminar, a presente dissertação estabelece como primeiro objetivo explorar a prática de tradução biomédica em Portugal, de forma a compreender quem são os agentes envolvidos na tradução biomédica, o que fazem, com que objetivos, em textos de que tipo, qual a função dos mesmos e para quem. Neste sentido, foi analisado um corpus de 700 mil palavras de diferentes tipos de texto de conteúdos médicos e biomédicos traduzidos de inglês para português europeu, incluindo mensagens de correio eletrónico trocadas entre tradutores e gestores de projeto. Esta análise demonstra que a tradução biomédica involve uma rede complexa de agentes de tradução que levam a cabo diferentes tarefas tradutórias, nas quais os revisores desempenham um papel fundamental. O tipo de texto mais comum identificado é o texto instrutivo de dispositivos médicos dirigidos a profissionais de saúde. No seguimento desta avaliação preliminar, para o estudo principal foi adoptada uma metodologia mista com base em abordagens quantitativas e qualitativas do produto e processo, de forma a estudar (i) trinta traduções de um texto instrutivo de um dispositivo médico dirigido a profissionais de saúde, (ii) as preferências tradutórias de quinze revisores e quinze profissionais de saúde relativamente ao mesmo texto instrutivo e (iii) as expectativas destes tradutores, revisores e profissionais de saúde sobre a tradução biomédica. A experiência envolveu a elicitação de dados de quinze tradutores júnior e quinze tradutores experientes, a quem foi pedido que traduzissem o texto instrutivo. Os dados incluíram registo de movimentos no teclado do computador e gravação do ecrã, versões preliminares e textos de chegada; os mesmos foram triangulados de modo a possibilitar uma descrição empírica do fenómeno tradutório de conteúdos biomédicos. Os dados foram analisados em termos (i) dos problemas tradutórios dos tradutores, (ii) das correspondentes soluções de tradução observadas e (iii) da orientação dos tipos de solução para as culturas e línguas de partida e chegada. Estes trinta tradutores, conjuntamente com os quinze revisores especializados e quinze profissionais de saúde, foram também convidados a responder a um questionário com o objetivo de elicitar os diferentes tipos de convicções e expectativas, de forma a (i) analisar as expectativas e perceções dos tradutores sobre a forma como estes traduzem e como outros tradutores, revisores e leitores acreditam que os tradutores deviam traduzir, (ii) identificar as preferências tradutórias dos revisores e dos profissionais de saúde e (iii) descrever uma rede complexa de convicções e expectativas que afetam os processos de tomada de decisão dos tradutores e que resulta da interação entre vários agentes com diferentes cargos e níveis de controlo normativo (iv) para propor hipóteses explicativas referentes ao fenómeno de tradução identificado. Com base na análise do produto, o estudo concluiu que (i) os tradutores juniores e experientes optaram por soluções de tradução regidas pelas culturas e línguas de partida e chegada e (ii) os revisores e os profissionais de saúde optaram pelas traduções maioritariamente regidas pela língua e cultura de chegada. As soluções de tradução regidas pela cultura e língua de chegada (i.e., explicitação, implicitação, hiperonímia/hiponímia, omissão, adição e outras alterações de conteúdo) também foram analisadas quanto à sua função textual e potenciais motivações para propor hipóteses explicativas. Com base na análise do processo, a comparação entre as versões preliminares e os textos de chegada indicou que, embora (i) os tradutores juniores progredissem de versões menos orientadas para a partida para mais orientadas para a partida, (ii) os tradutores experientes progrediram de versões mais orientadas para a partida para menos orientadas para a partida. Com base na análise das convicções e das expectativas, o estudo concluiu que (i) enquanto os tradutores juniores e experientes recorreram a critérios regidos pelas culturas e línguas de partida e chegada para descrever a “correção” de uma tradução, (ii) os revisores e os profissionais de saúde indicaram critérios regidos pelas culturas e línguas de chegada como sendo os mais importantes para descrever a “correção” de uma tradução. Em suma, o comportamento e as expectativas dos tradutores juniores e experientes apontam para as normas iniciais de orientação para a cultura e língua de partida e de orientação para a cultura e língua de chegada, revelando assim uma valorização de aspetos de ambas as culturas e línguas. Também se apontam outras possíveis motivações para as orientações para as culturas e línguas de partida e de chegada baseadas na análise dos processos de tradutores juniores e experientes referentes (i) ao número de problemas de tradução e (ii) ao tempo empreendido para traduzir o texto de partida. O comportamento e as expectativas dos revisores e profissionais de saúde apontam para uma norma inicial regida pela cultura e língua de chegada, revelando uma valorização superior das culturas e línguas de chegada e do leitor prospetivo. O estudo concluiu também que embora a exatidão (um critério regido pela cultura e língua de partida) seja uma expectativa transversal a todos os agentes, as expectativas referentes à tradução literal (regida pela cultura e língua de partida), transparência e invisibilidade (regida pela cultura e língua de chegada) não são partilhadas pelos tradutores, revisores e profissionais de saúde. Ao descrever como as perceções e as expectativas referentes à regência das culturas e línguas de partida e chegada podem influenciar as regularidades textuais dos tradutores, as conclusões do presente estudo descritivo constituem um contributo para o aprofundamento do conhecimento sobre as normas tradutórias, em geral, e da tradução biomédica, em particular. As principais implicações do presente estudo são de quatro tipos: teóricas, metodológicas, práticas e pedagógicas. Ao nível teórico, este estudo propõe uma definição de normas tradutórias que (i) considera a distinção entre discursos ao nível objeto e ao nível meta (baseando-se em Rosa 2016c), (ii) inclui explicitamente o papel das expectativas dos agentes enquanto força motriz de comportamento, conotando o que se considera “correto” e “incorreto” (adaptado de Bicchieri 2017a) e (iii) enfatiza a necessidade de abordar perceções diferentes e, por vezes, contrárias em relação ao que é considerado como “correto” e “incorreto” numa comunidade específica. Além disso, o estudo apresenta também ferramentas metodológicas, propondo que o estudo das normas tradutórias possa ser aprofundado através da análise comparativa de uma classificação pormenorizada de convicções, atitudes e expectativas elicitadas de diferentes agentes com cargos diversos (adaptado de Bicchieri 2017a). Também descreve como os problemas tradutórios podem ser identificados com base em dados dos registos de movimentos no teclado do computador e gravação de ecrã através uma classificação detalhada das unidades de tradução baseada em indicadores primários e secundários de problemas tradutórios (adaptado a partir de Krings 1986 e Göpferich 2010b) para reconstruir os processos de tomada de decisão do tradutor e, mais especificamente, a distinção metodológica entre uma solução preliminar e uma decisão conscientemente adiada. As regularidades descritas e as expectativas expressas também têm implicações para a prática de tradução e para a formação de tradutores. Os resultados podem ser integrados na prática tradutória e na formação de tradutores, de forma a desenvolver soluções concretas para abordar as competências tradutórias e boas práticas na indústria das línguas. Recomenda-se que os estudantes sejam formados especificamente no sentido de se promover a consciencialização de modo a monitorizarem e avaliarem, nos seus processos de tomada de decisão de tradução e revisão, de que forma as suas expectativas sobre a tradução e as suas expectativas presumidas sobre os revisores e leitores têm impacto nas suas soluções de tradução. Dado que a comunicação entre tradutores profissionais e revisores pode contribuir para as perceções distintas identificadas relativamente às expectativas, também são propostas boas práticas para o feedback entre pares. Além disso, as universidades são chamadas a atuarem para promoverem a comunicação entre tradutores profissionais, revisores e leitores nos domínios especializados, contribuindo simultaneamente para colmatar o fosso entre as comunidades profissional e académica

Cleaning Corporate Governance

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced. We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding eighty percent in the G-Index, the most widely used proxy for “good governance” in law and finance. Correcting these errors substantially weakens one of the most well-known results in law and finance, which associates good governance with higher investment returns. Second, we make our corpus freely available to others, in hope of providing a long-overdue resource for traditional scholars as well as those exploring new frontiers in corporate governance, ranging from machine learning to stakeholder governance to the effects of common ownership. Third, and more broadly, our analysis exposes twin cautionary tales about the critical role of lawyers in empirical research, and the dubious practice of throttling public access to public records

User-Centered Translation in Website Localization - Overall Usability of the Finnish Country Site of Hotels.com

Nykyajan globalisoituvassa maailmassa yritysten on tärkeää tarjota Internet-sivut kotimaisten asiakkaiden lisäksi kansainvälisille markkinoille. Tämä tarve korostuu erityisesti matkailualan yrityksillä. Jotta sivusto tavoittaisi asiakkaita mahdollisimman kattavasti ympäri maailman, pelkkä englanninkielinen sivusto ei riitä, vaan tarvitaan myös lokalisoituja eli kohdekieleen ja -kulttuuriin kotoutettuja versioita, maasivustoja. Lokalisointi kattaa useita eri toimintoja kuten tekstin kääntämisen sekä muiden elementtien muokkaamisen kohdekulttuurin vaatimusten mukaiseksi. Menestyksekkään lokalisoinnin taustalla on käytettävyyden huomioiminen joka vaiheessa. Tässä pro gradu -tutkielmassa arvioitiin globaalin matkailualan brändin Hotels.comin Suomen maasivujen kokonaiskäytettävyyttä. Erityisesti tutkittiin Suomen maasivuston käännöksiä Tytti Suojasen, Kaisa Koskisen ja Tiina Tuomisen hiljattain kehittämän käyttäjäkeskeisen kääntämisen (UCT) näkökulmasta, mutta myös erilaisten kulttuuristen elementtien kotouttamista sekä sivuston yleistä käytettävyyttä. Tutkielmassa sovellettiin Jakob Nielsenin alun perin teknisen viestinnän tarkoituksiin kehittämää heuristista arviointia, joka on myös yksi UCT-metodeista. Materiaalia tarkasteltiin heuristisesti nettisivujen globalisoinnin, lokalisoinnin, käännösten sekä yleisen käytettävyyden näkökulmista. Jokaiselle näkökulmalle luotiin omat heuristiikat, jotka pohjautuvat John Yunkerin verkkoglobalisoinnin parhaat käytänteet -listaan, mm. Bert Esselinkin, Minako O’Haganin ja Carmen Mangironin näkemyksiin lokali-soinnista, Suojanen ym.:n käyttäjäkeskeisen kääntämisen konseptiin sekä Nielsenin perustavanlaatuisiin näkemyksiin käytettävyydestä. Ennakko-oletuksen mukaisesti heuristinen arviointi osoittautui hyödylliseksi nettisivujen käännösten arvioinnissa. Heuristiikkojen avulla löydettiin todellisia käytettävyysongelmia sekä käännösten että muiden tutkittujen aspektien alueelta. Löydetyt käytettävyysongelmat olivat pääsääntöisesti melko pieniä, vain muutama oli vakavuusluokitukseltaan suuri ja vaatisi pikaista korjausta. Suomen maasivusto osoittautui siis kokonaisuudessaan käytettävyydeltään hyväksi sivustoksi. Löydetyn kaltaiset ongelmat voitaisiin kuitenkin välttää käyttämällä heuristiikkoja jo lokalisoinnin alkuvaiheessa. Niiden käyttö iteratiivisesti puolestaan mahdollistaa ongelmien korjauksen päivitysten yhteydessä. Tutkielman tuloksista on hyötyä paitsi Hotels.comin lokalisoinnista vastaaville tahoille myös muille matkailualan maakohtaisia verkkosivuja lokalisoiville.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

A translation robot for each translator? : a comparative study of manual translation and post-editing of machine translations: process, quality and translator attitude

To keep up with the growing need for translation in today's globalised society, post-editing of machine translation is increasingly being used as an alternative to regular human translation. While presumably faster than human translation, it is still unsure whether the quality of a post-edited text is comparable to the quality of a human translation, especially for general text types. In addition, there is a lack of understanding of the post-editing process, the effort involved, and the attitude of translators towards it. This dissertation contains a comparative analysis of post-editing and human translation by students and professional translators for general text types from English into Dutch. We study process, product, and translators' attitude in detail. We first conducted two pretests with student translators to try possible experimental setups and to develop a translation quality assessment approach suitable for a fine-grained comparative analysis of machine-translated texts, post-edited texts, and human translations. For the main experiment, we examined students and professional translators, using a combination of keystroke logging tools, eye tracking, and surveys. We used both qualitative analyses and advanced statistical analyses (mixed effects models), allowing for a multifaceted analysis. For the process analysis, we looked at translation speed, cognitive processing by means of eye fixations, the usage of external resources and its impact on overall time. For the product analysis, we looked at overall quality, frequent error types, and the impact of using external resources on quality. The attitude analysis contained questions about perceived usefulness, perceived speed, perceived quality of machine translation and post-editing, and the translation method that was perceived as least tiring. One survey was conducted before the experiment, the other after, so we could detect changes in attitude after participation. In two more detailed analyses, we studied the impact of machine translation quality on various types of post-editing effort indicators, and on the post-editing of multi-word units. We found that post-editing is faster than human translation, and that both translation methods lead to products of comparable overall quality. The more detailed error analysis showed that post-editing leads to somewhat better results regarding adequacy, and human translation leads to better results regarding acceptability. The most common errors for both translation methods are meaning shifts, logical problems, and wrong collocations. Fixation data indicated that post-editing was cognitively less demanding than human translation, and that more attention was devoted to the target text than to the source text. We found that fewer resources are consulted during post-editing than during human translation, although the overall time spent in external resources was comparable. The most frequently used external resources were Google Search, concordancers, and dictionaries. Spending more time in external resources, however, did not lead to an increase in quality. Translators indicated that they found machine translation useful, but they preferred human translation and found it more rewarding. Perceptions about speed and quality were mixed. Most participants believed post-editing to be at least as fast and as good as human translation, but barely ever better. We further discovered that different types of post-editing effort indicators were impacted by different types of machine translation errors, with coherence issues, meaning shifts, and grammatical and structural issues having the greatest effect. HTER, though commonly used, does not correlate well with more process-oriented post-editing effort indicators. Regarding the post-editing of multi-word units, we suggest 'contrast with the target language' as a useful new way of classifying multi-word units, as contrastive multi-word units were much harder to post-edit. In addition, we noticed that research strategies for post-editing multi-word units lack efficiency. Consulting external resources did lead to an increased quality of post-edited multi-word units, but a lot of time was spent in external resources when this was not necessary. Interestingly, the differences between human translation and post-editing usually outweighed the differences between students and professionals. Students did cognitively process texts differently, having longer fixation durations on the source text during human translation, and more fixations on the target text during post-editing, whereas professional translators' fixation behaviour remained constant. For the usage of external resources, only the time spent in dictionaries was higher for students than for professional translators, the usage of other resources was comparable. Overall quality was comparable for students and professionals, but professionals made fewer adequacy errors. Deletions were more noticeable for students than for professional translators in both methods of translation, and word sense issues were more noticeable for professional translators than for students when translating from scratch. Surprisingly, professional translators were often more positive about post-editing than students, believing they could produce products of comparable quality with both methods of translation. Students in particular struggled with the cognitive processing of meaning shifts, and they spent more time in pauses than professional translators. Some of the key contributions of this dissertation to the field of translation studies are the fact that we compared students and professional translators, developed a fine-grained translation quality assessment approach, and used a combination of state-of-the-art logging tools and advanced statistical methods. The effects of experience in our study were limited, and we suggest looking at specialisation and translator confidence in future work. Our guidelines for translation quality assessment can be found in the appendix, and contain practical instructions for use with brat, an open-source annotation tool. The experiment described in this dissertation is also the first to integrate Inputlog and CASMACAT, making it possible to include information on external resources in the CASMACAT logging files, which can be added to the CRITT Translation Process Research Database. Moving beyond the methodological contributions, our findings can be integrated in translation teaching, machine translation system development, and translation tool development. Translators need hands-on post-editing experience to get acquainted with common machine translation errors, and students in particular need to be taught successful strategies to spot and solve adequacy issues. Post-editors would greatly benefit from machine translation systems that made fewer coherence errors, meaning shift errors, and grammatical and structural errors. If visual clues are included in a translation tool (e.g., potentially problematic passages or polysemous words), these should be added to the target text. Tools could further benefit from integration with commonly used external resources, such as dictionaries. In the future, we wish to study the translation and post-editing process in even more detail, taking pause behaviour and regressions into account, as well as look at the passages participants perceived as the most difficult to translate and post-edit. We further wish to gain an even better understanding of the usage of external resources, by looking at the types of queries and by linking queries back to source and target text words. While our findings are limited to the post-editing and human translation of general text types from English into Dutch, we believe our methodology can be applied to different settings, with different language pairs. It is only by studying both processes in many different situations and by comparing findings that we will be able to develop tools and create courses that better suit translators' needs. This, in turn, will make for better, and happier, future generations of translators

Analyzing Text Complexity and Text Simplification: Connecting Linguistics, Processing and Educational Applications

Reading plays an important role in the process of learning and knowledge acquisition for both children and adults. However, not all texts are accessible to every prospective reader. Reading difficulties can arise when there is a mismatch between a reader’s language proficiency and the linguistic complexity of the text they read. In such cases, simplifying the text in its linguistic form while retaining all the content could aid reader comprehension. In this thesis, we study text complexity and simplification from a computational linguistic perspective. We propose a new approach to automatically predict the text complexity using a wide range of word level and syntactic features of the text. We show that this approach results in accurate, generalizable models of text readability that work across multiple corpora, genres and reading scales. Moving from documents to sentences, We show that our text complexity features also accurately distinguish different versions of the same sentence in terms of the degree of simplification performed. This is useful in evaluating the quality of simplification performed by a human expert or a machine-generated output and for choosing targets to simplify in a difficult text. We also experimentally show the effect of text complexity on readers’ performance outcomes and cognitive processing through an eye-tracking experiment. Turning from analyzing text complexity and identifying sentential simplifications to generating simplified text, one can view automatic text simplification as a process of translation from English to simple English. In this thesis, we propose a statistical machine translation based approach for text simplification, exploring the role of focused training data and language models in the process. Exploring the linguistic complexity analysis further, we show that our text complexity features can be useful in assessing the language proficiency of English learners. Finally, we analyze German school textbooks in terms of their linguistic complexity, across various grade levels, school types and among different publishers by applying a pre-existing set of text complexity features developed for German

Online tutor for research writing

English is the most prominent second language used in educational programs throughout the world. Unfortunately, there is a limitation of time and skill to guide students with learning the language and for evaluating their writings. Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) tools would help in addressing this gap. In this thesis, I document a contribution to the field of Automated Writing Evaluation in the form of a new AWE tool called the Research Writing Tutor (RWT). The system design, user interface design, and features of this tool are introduced first, and then the findings obtained from an user evaluation study are reported. The website has been designed and developed to be user friendly. This tool could be of great use to graduate students and undergraduates in writing research reports, articles, and thesis or dissertations. Unlike most studies that concentrate on the accuracy of the AWE systems, this study aims at the usability and utility of the RWT in addition to the trust on automated systems