Building a resource for studying translation shifts

This paper describes an interdisciplinary approach which brings together the fields of corpus linguistics and translation studies. It presents ongoing work on the creation of a corpus resource in which translation shifts are explicitly annotated. Translation shifts denote departures from formal correspondence between source and target text, i.e. deviations that have occurred during the translation process. A resource in which such shifts are annotated in a systematic way will make it possible to study those phenomena that need to be addressed if machine translation output is to resemble human translation. The resource described in this paper contains English source texts (parliamentary proceedings) and their German translations. The shift annotation is based on predicate-argument structures and proceeds in two steps: first, predicates and their arguments are annotated monolingually in a straightforward manner. Then, the corresponding English and German predicates and arguments are aligned with each other. Whenever a shift - mainly grammatical or semantic -has occurred, the alignment is tagged accordingly.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

The struggle for sentencing reform : will the English guidelines model spread?

Are closely comparable countries following the path forged by England and Wales by moving towards the development of systematic sentencing guidelines by a Sentencing Council? And if they are not, how are these different paths explicable

A sense of justice : the role of pre-sentence reports in the production (and disruption) of guilt and guilty pleas

The criminal justice process in the lower and intermediate courts depends on defendants admitting guilt and being seen to do so voluntarily. Hitherto, there has been limited academic consideration of how pre-sentence reports and their associated processes interact with the dynamics of guilty pleas. Drawing on recent research following through the production, use, and interpretation of a sample of reports, this article concentrates on the troubling inconsistency with which legal professionals (especially judges and lawyers) are continually confronted: namely, between their ideals of ‘proper’ legal justice and the pragmatic daily reality in which they have to participate. How do legal professionals manage this sense of inconsistency? The article suggests that reports are vital to enabling legal professionals to process defendants in good, or at least not bad, conscience. In particular, reports pacify the lingering unease felt by legal professionals that the everyday summary court processes may be too abrupt, abstract and impersonal. Reports and their associated processes pacify this unease in three ways. Firstly, reports display to legal professionals that defendants are treated individually, and with a degree of respect and humanity. Secondly, report processes (including their anticipation) assist the management of defendants and facilitate the production of guilty pleas. Thirdly, reports, generally (but by no means always), help to facilitate the ‘closure’ of guilty pleas. In these three ways, the ‘efficienct’ mass processing of defendants via guilty pleas is enabled by a sense among legal professionals of the individualised justice which reports seem to them to display

Conceptions and representations of the sentencing decision process

This article attempts to reflect on the success of attempts by academic research to understand and explain the sentencing decision process. It identifies conventional themes in the conception and representation of that decision process and argues that there are some important difficulties associated with them and consequently implications for both the findings of sentencing research and for approaches to sentencing reform. The article suggests a possible alternative approach to conceptualizing and representing the sentencing decision process and also raises questions about the nature of the discretionary (legal) decision process more generally

Sentencing and penal practices : Is Scotland losing its distinctiveness?

This chapter discusses sentencing and penal practices in Scotland

Niche diversification of Sphagnum in Bolivia

Niche breadth values of Sphagnum species in the páramo and cloud forests of Bolivia are similar to those reported for Sphagnum-dominated peatlands in North America, but niche overlap values are higher for Sphagnum species in Bolivia. The pH, conductivity, and concentrations of Ca, Mg, Na, K, and P suggest that Sphagnum habitats in Bolivia are ombrotrophic in nature. Sphagnum is limited to small, scattered carpets in the páramo and cloud forests of the Bolivian Andes between 1800 and 4200 m. Common species found in these habitats include S. alegrense Warnst., S. boliviae Warnst., S. cuspidatum Ehrh., S. magellanicum Brid., S. oxyphyllum Warnst., S. recurvum P. Beauv., S. sanctojosephense Crum & Crosby, and S. sparsum Hampe

A sentencing exception? Changing sentencing policy in Scotland

This article reviews developments in penal policy and to sentencing reform in Scotland over the last decade. The devolved government was established in 1999 following the first elections to a Scottish Parliament. Despite being part of the United Kingdom, Scotland has long maintained its own legal system, an established church and education system, and a civic culture which valued 'community, public provision of welfare and mutual support' which has been considered to be distinctively Scottish. This article examines the changing character of sentencing policy to explore whether Scottish sentencing and penal policy remains relatively distinctive in international terms

Incentives for Spatially Coordinated Land Conservation: A Conditional Agglomeration Bonus

Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,