Revision of Business Content on Corporate Social Responsibility: Measuring the Impact of Training on the Cognitive Effort of Second-Language University Students

With more and more people interested in how sustainable and socially responsible companies are, the comprehensibility of content on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become paramount. Producing easy-to-read business content – either by writing it from scratch or revising it – is a cognitively demanding undertaking, especially for second-language non-professional writers. Both formal training and sustained practice can help writers build expertise and, in turn, be considerate of their intended audience. In particular, research on the impact of training has usually yielded positive results when examining the texts produced following specific instruction. However, the extent to which training has a positive effect on the process of writing and revision is still under-researched, especially in second language. To address this gap, we report on an experimental study that examines the impact of reader-oriented training on the cognitive effort experienced by 47 second-language university students when revising CSR content. We adopted a pre-test post-test design, and we used keystroke logging and retrospective interviews to collect data on students' pausing behaviour, use of online sources, and strategies to approach the revision task. Our training seemed to reduce the cognitive effort linked with lexical choices. Furthermore, it provided some students with procedural knowledge on how to approach the revision task in a more efficient way. We also observed a general tendency to rewrite (rather than revise) CSR content despite the higher cognitive effort required by rewriting. We discuss implications for training, limitations, and future research avenues

Comprehension and trust in crises: investigating the impact of machine translation and post-editing

We conducted a survey to understand the impact of machine translation and postediting awareness on comprehension of and trust in messages disseminated to prepare the public for a weather-related crisis, i.e. flooding. The translation direction was English–Italian. Sixty-one participants—all native Italian speakers with different English proficiency levels— answered our survey. Each participant read and evaluated between three and six crisis messages using ratings and openended questions on comprehensibility and trust. The messages were in English and Italian. All the Italian messages had been machine translated and post-edited. Nevertheless, participants were told that only half had been post-edited, so that we could test the impact of post-editing awareness. We could not draw firm conclusions when comparing the scores for trust and comprehensibility assigned to the three types of messages—English, post-edits, and purported raw outputs. However, when scores were triangulated with open-ended answers, stronger patterns were observed, such as the impact of fluency of the translations on their comprehensibility and trustworthiness. We found correlations between comprehensibility and trustworthiness, and identified other factors influencing these aspects, such as the clarity and soundness of the messages. We conclude by outlining implications for crisis preparedness, limitations, and areas for future research

Intralingual translation and cascading crises: evaluating the impact of semi-automation on the readability and comprehensibility of health content

During crises, intralingual translation (or simplification) of medical content can facilitate comprehension among lay readers and foster their compliance with instructions aimed to avoid or mitigate the cascading effects of crises. The onus of simplifying health-related texts often falls on medical experts, and the task of intralingual translation tends to be nonautomated. Medical authors are asked to check and remember different sets of plain language guidelines, while also relying on their interpretation of how and when to implement these guidelines. Accordingly, even simplified health-related texts present characteristics that make them difficult to read and comprehend, particularly for an audience with low (health) literacy. Against this background, this chapter describes an experimental study aimed at testing the impact that using a controlled language (CL) checker to semi-automate intralingual translation has on the readability and comprehensibility of medical content. The study focused on the plain language summaries and abstracts produced by the non-profit organisation Cochrane. Using Coh-Metrix and recall, this investigation found that the introduction of a CL checker influenced some readability features, but not lay readers’ comprehension, regardless of their native language. Finally, strategies to enhance the comprehensibility of health content and reduce the vulnerability of readers in crises are discussed

Relational goods, sociability, and happiness.

The role of sociability and relational goods has generally been neglected in the formulation of standard economics textbook preferences. Our findings show that relational goods have significant and positive effects on self declared life satisfaction, net of the impact of other concurring factors. We also document that such effects persist when the equally significant inverse causality nexus is taken into account. This implies that a more intense relational life enhances life satisfaction and, at the same time, happier people have a more lively social life. Finally, we show that gender, age and education matter by showing that the effects of sociability on happiness are stronger for women, older and less educated individuals.

Seeking health content online: a survey of Internet users’ habits and needs

This paper describes a small-scale survey conducted among non-native speakers of English living in Ireland. We collected data from 86 respondents by means of an online questionnaire. Our goal was to investigate their health information seeking behaviour; potential comprehension issues with health content; and their adoption of machine translation (MT) systems. We found that: the Internet is widely used for health-related searches; Wikipedia is the most consulted website; and information on illnesses and public health threats is frequently sought. We observed that the language in which online searches are conducted is influenced by respondents’ self-reported level of English proficiency, with most limited English proficiency (LEP) Internet users looking for health information in their native languages to facilitate comprehension. We also observed that specialised medical vocabulary might hinder comprehension. Finally, most participants reported adopting MT to translate online health content from English into their native languages, and LEP respondents reported using MT more frequently than proficient respondents. This survey highlights the need to increase the accessibility of online health content for nonnative speakers of English (especially LEP users) with a view to reducing their vulnerability. We argue that text simplification might lead to the production of more comprehensible and more machine translatable health-related texts

Modelling the analysis of translation memory use and post-editing of raw machine translation output: A pilot study of trainee translators' perceptions of difficulty and time effectiveness

This paper describes a pilot study undertaken to propose a model for the analysis of the respective impact of translation memory (TM) use and full post-editing (PE) of raw machine translation (MT) output on the level of difficulty perceived and on the time needed by trainee translators. Six Italian MA-level translation students were asked to produce high-quality target texts when translating semi-specialised material from English into their native Italian. For this experiment, we proposed a model of data triangulation in which we measured the time taken to complete the tasks and we collected data on their translation with TM software and PE processes by means of think-aloud protocols (TAPs) and retrospective interviews. We studied the extent to which the number of translation solutions regarded as correct influenced, on the one hand, the perception of difficulty associated with the translation strategies employed and, on the other, the duration of the translation and PE tasks. Using a TM led to a reduction of the difficulty perceived and of the time employed by the participants as a result of the increased correct translation solutions provided. In contrast, a reduction was not observed when participants post-edited raw MT output. Further factors were assumed to influence the translation and PE processes of the students, especially their attitudes towards the translation technologies being use

A novel through space and time

Imagine that you wake up in a reality that does not really belong to you. This is exactly what happens to Megan Newman, a young American woman, who is not able to recognize anything around herself, not even her image reflected in the mirror. It takes quite a lot of time before the truth comes out from the labyrinth of her mind: the loss of memory is just the terrible consequence of her traveling across parallel universes