Human capital, technological spillovers and development across OECD countries

In this paper, we study the relationship between the level of development of an economy and returns to different levels of education for the panel of OECD countries over the 1965-2004 period, in a club convergence framework. The connection between growth and human capital measures of primary, secondary and tertiary education in a multiple-club spatial convergence model with non linearities and spatial dependence is considered. By decomposing total schooling into its three constituent parts, we are able to evaluate their impact on regional growth without imposing homogeneous returns from each level of education. We contribute to the identification of two regimes for OECD countries, each characterized by different returns on physical and human capital accumulation and technological spillovers. We also find that the non-monotonic pattern of convergence is strongly influenced by human capital stocks and technology diffusion process is stronger in the club less close to the technological frontier.

Comparing collocations in translated and learner language

This paper compares use of collocations by Italian learners writing in and translating into English, conceptualising the two tasks as different modes of constrained language production and adopting Halverson’s (2017) Revised Gravitational Pull hypothesis as a theoretical model. A particular focus is placed on identifying a method for comparing datasets containing translations and essays, assembled opportunistically and varying in size and structure. The study shows that lexical association scores for dependency-defined word pairs are significantly higher in translations than essays. A qualitative analysis of a subset of collocations shared and unique to either mode shows that the former set features more collocations with direct cross-linguistic links (connectivity), and that the source/first language seems to affect both modes similarly. We tentatively conclude that second/target language salience effects are more visible in translation than second language use, while connectivity and source language salience affect both modes of bilingual processing similarly, regardless of the mediation variable

Partnership among firms: Estimating the probability of contact from the Poisson model using repeated observations

The aim of this paper is to study the probability to find an opportunity of collaboration among small and medium sized firms by participating in the Europartenariat meeting created to encourage co-operation links. Contacts among firms are relatively few in number and are assumed to be generated by a Poisson process. Empirical results of different Poisson regression models with reference to parameters’ estimates, predicted probabilities, and marginal effects on event probabilities have been obtained. They provide interesting results related to productive, technological, commercial, and financial projects, in terms of the dynamic behaviour of a typical European firm. Finally, normative evaluation of economic policy has been possible

An Optimal Partnership Search Model: Theoretical Implications for the Europartenariat Event

A theoretical search model applied to collaboration among firms with a public authority as an intermediate is the primary issue of this paper. Specifically, we consider the Europartenariat event since it represents a good opportunity to study a problem of interaction between the decision to search a collaboration and the exchange of information involved in a bargaining process. Search costs play a central role in this framework. We show the optimality of a strategy as to the number of contacts with host companies in a problem of dynamic programming. Precisely, solutions in a search model with the presence of fixed and quadratic costs are derived in terms of an optimal threshold number of contacts and of an optimal interval of the number of contacts, respectively. For the case of fixed costs, we find that the minimum number of contacts for which the firm accepts to participate is negatively related to the expected profit and to the probability of contacting one firm with a common project of collaboration. This is confirmed by a simulation. In the quadratic cost hypothesis we investigate learning phenomena and revelation of private information

Toward a new profile for twenty-first century language specialists: Industry, institutional and academic insights. UPSKILLS Intellectual Output 1.2

The extraordinary achievements of artificial intelligence are impacting all sectors of society and raising issues that concern, among others, what emerging skills are needed by the world of work, how amplification of the current gender gap can be limited, and whether disruption can be an engine for positive change. These issues affect the language and linguistics sectors strongly, and should be carefully considered by higher education degrees in setting their priorities so as to favour employability, job retention and job satisfaction for the coming years

A corpus linguistics sandwich. Learners chewing over reporting verbs in academic writing

Our lessons form part of a module on corpus linguistics from the Master's in Specialized Translation at UNIBO. The lessons are a \u201csandwich\u201d because the central content, citations expressed through projecting clauses, is approached from the twin perspectives of the two module tracks, language and linguistics. In the language lesson, learners shadow the teacher's exemplification of citation functions, then \u201cclassify\u201d corpus data, matching citation functions and examples, and generate functional descriptions. In the linguistics lesson, they apply the knowledge of citation acquired in the language lesson to pursue a corpus-based comparison of two language varieties (native and lingua franca English). Overall, students found that the sandwich was challenging and required critical, autonomous thinking; but arguably this is precisely what is required of future professional translators

Analisi di corpora per la traduzione: una lezione introduttiva

This contribution aims to provide an introduction to corpus linguistics for students of translation. Differently from most such introductions, it does not focus on technical and historical issues, nor on tools and resources. Instead, it discusses the theoretical presuppositions (syntagmatic relations, communicative competence, the importance of lexis and phraseology) and fundamental notions of Neo-Firthian corpus linguistics (units of meaning, collocations, colligation, semantic (or evaluative) prosody and semantic preferences). These syntagmatic relations, together with different kinds of general corpus features (frequency indices such as type-token ratio or sentence length, word frequency lists, n-grams lists) can be used in the analysis and comparison of language varieties of different kinds. One such variety, that is especially relevant for translation students, is the language of translation. Through the combined use of a monolingual comparable and a parallel corpus, specificities of translation as mediated communication can be investigated (following Baker's (1993) hypothesis), at the same time taking into account the potential effect of source language interference. The paper concludes by claiming that, far from being a limitation, the cognitive complexity of corpus use can be turned into a pedagogic asset, contributing to future-proof translator education by fostering critical thinking and autonomy and developing analytical skills

Do translator trainees trust machine translation? An experiment on post-editing and revision

Despite the importance of trust in any work environment, this concept has rarely been investigated for MT. The present contribution aims at filling this gap by presenting a post-editing experiment carried out with translator trainees. An institutional academic text was translated from Italian into English. All participants worked on the same target text. Half of them were told that the text was a human translation needing revision, while the other half was told that it was an MT output to be postedited. Temporal and technical effort were measured based on words per second and HTER. Results were complemented with a manual analysis of a subset of the observations

MAGMATic: A Multi-domain Academic Gold Standard with Manual Annotation of Terminology for Machine Translation Evaluation

This paper presents MAGMATic (Multidomain Academic Gold Standard with Manual Annotation of Terminology), a novel Italian–English benchmark which allows MT evaluation focused on terminology translation. The data set comprises 2,056 parallel sentences extracted from institutional academic texts, namely course unit and degree program descriptions. This text type is particularly interesting since it contains terminology from multiple domains, e.g. education and different academic disciplines described in the texts. All terms in the English target side of the data set were manually identified and annotated with a domain label, for a total of 7,517 annotated terms. Due to their peculiar features, institutional academic texts represent an interesting test bed for MT. As a further contribution of this paper, we investigate the feasibility of exploiting MT for the translation of this type of documents. To this aim, we evaluate two stateof-the-art Neural MT systems on MAGMATic, focusing on their ability to translate domain-specific terminology

Mediated discourse at the European Parliament: Empirical investigations

The purpose of this book is to showcase a diverse set of directions in empirical research on mediated discourse, reflecting on the state-of-the-art and the increasing intersection between Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CBIS) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). Undeniably, data from the European Parliament (EP) offer a great opportunity for such research. Not only does the institution provide a sizeable sample of oral debates held at the EP together with their simultaneous interpretations into all languages of the European Union. It also makes available written verbatim reports of the original speeches, which used to be translated. From a methodological perspective, EP materials thus guarantee a great degree of homogeneity, which is particularly valuable in corpus studies, where data comparability is frequently a challenge. In this volume, progress is visible in both CBIS and CBTS. In interpreting, it manifests itself notably in the availability of comprehensive transcription, annotation and alignment systems. In translation, datasets are becoming substantially richer in metadata, which allow for increasingly refined multi-factorial analysis. At the crossroads between the two fields, intermodal investigations bring to the fore what these mediation modes have in common and how they differ. The volume is thus aimed in particular at Interpreting and Translation scholars looking for new descriptive insights and methodological approaches in the investigation of mediated discourse, but it may be also of interest for (corpus) linguists analysing parliamentary discourse in general