Translanguaging business: Unpredictability and precarity in superdiverse inner city Leeds

The Leeds business case study focuses on Klára, a Czech-speaking community interpreter and her work with advocates providing interpreting services on an hourly-paid basis for a number of organizations. Klára’s business is her interpreting work with advocates who are primarily concerned with assisting Czech and Slovak Roma migrants in Leeds with the problems they face with life in a new country, principally the complex business of claiming benefits. Our work with Klára allows an insight into the lives of these new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions. We examine translanguaging in four different areas: English/Czech/Slovak interlingual translanguaging, intralingual translanguaging in English, intralingual translanguaging in Czech and Slovak, and interdiscursive translanguaging. Our study extends into Klára’s home life, where we see that Klára works hard to ensure that her children have access to the Czech language. We also examine her electronically-mediated communication, much of which exemplifies the blurring of boundaries between work and social interaction in online communication. The study took place in the Leeds suburb of Harehills. In the process of collecting data with Klára, we gained an insight into the lives of new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions, using the notion of translanguaging. Klára’s work as a community interpreter means that language is crucially her business. Our study also extends into Klára’s home life, and we see that Klára also makes language her business there, working to ensure that her children have regular and consistent access to the Czech language. This report comprises eight sections overall. Following this introduction we provide background on the Roma in Leeds, the population who Klára has most contact with in her professional life. In Section 3 we discuss the foundational literature relevant to our study: superdiversity and neoliberalism; the employment and also exploitation characteristic in early stage migration; how linguistic ethnography can afford rich insights that it does into the events and practices we observe; a focus on the interpreting event from a literacy studies perspective; the site of interpreting as a contact zone; translanguaging at work and at home; and the use of social media in superdiverse multilingual environments. Section 4 on methodology details our overall approach, gives an overview of data collection, and describes the individual data sets, and how our analysis enables them to work in combination. The two central analysis sections (5 and 6) cover respectively interaction at work and translanguaging in the home, and we include a short section (7) on mediated discourse which straddles the work/life boundary

Heritage With No Fixed Abode: Transforming Cultural Heritage for Migrant Communities in Inner-City Leeds

This paper reports on the second phase of the AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging (TLang) project, on the theme of Heritage. The Key Participant for the Heritage theme in Leeds is Monika, a young Slovak Roma woman living and working in inner-city Leeds. Monika and her brother Ivan each aspire to setting up cultural spaces for the Roma people in their area. The activities they hope to initiate will safeguard and transmit to others that which is important to them – their heritage – including music, food, dance. As yet, there is no such space for the Roma in Leeds, and in this respect they are attempting to make something happen where there is currently nothing. We follow Monika in particular, as she attempts to bring her ideas into being. With the support of others, Monika tries to transform her available cultural capital into something that will preserve and consolidate heritage but will also earn her a living. This she does by starting to set up a social enterprise. Among other activities this entails the completion of a business plan. We follow her as the plan moves through stages of transformation, and in the process see her dreams and aspirations become both tangible and at the same time constrained. In the later parts of the paper we examine familiar tokens of cultural heritage, food and music, that play a part in the daily lives of Monika and her family, but which (in the case of food) Ivan is attempting to transform from cultural to economic capital, to make something that provides a living

Decrease in C-reactive protein levels in rabbits after vaccination with a live attenuated myxoma virus vaccine

The aim of this study was to evaluate the acute phase reaction and immune response of rabbits triggered by vaccination with a live attenuated myxoma virus (MXT) vaccine. Thirteen adult and 11 juvenile New Zealand white rabbit-based crossbreed rabbits, were used. Samples of rabbit peripheral blood were collected from vena auricularis centralis into heparinised tubes before vaccination and 48 h after vaccination. All animals were vaccinated by subcutaneous injection (0.5 ml) with a MXT vaccine. The blood plasma C-reactive protein level was measured by an ELISA kit using a double-antibody sandwich. For phenotyping of lymphocytes the fresh cells were stained with the following anti-rabbit monoclonal antibodies: anti-IgM, anti-CD4, anti-CD8 and anti-pan T2. Our results show that the use of attenuated myxoma virus vaccine significantly decreases the level of C-reactive protein in blood plasma of adult rabbits by 38.14% (P < 0.05) and of juvenile rabbits by 37.63% (P < 0.001), within 48 h. The rabbit C-reactive protein after MXT vaccination is a negative acute phase protein. In the group of adult rabbits the immune response to MXT vaccination was accompanied by a non-significant decrease in CD4+, pT2+, IgM+ subsets. On the other hand the values of CD8+, CD4+CD8+ and CD4+/CD8+ were non-significantly higher after MXT vaccination

Probable neuroimmunological link between Toxoplasma and cytomegalovirus infections and personality changes in the human host

BACKGROUND: Recently, a negative association between Toxoplasma-infection and novelty seeking was reported. The authors suggested that changes of personality trait were caused by manipulation activity of the parasite, aimed at increasing the probability of transmission of the parasite from an intermediate to a definitive host. They also suggested that low novelty seeking indicated an increased level of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain of infected subjects, a phenomenon already observed in experimentally infected rodents. However, the changes in personality can also be just a byproduct of any neurotropic infection. Moreover, the association between a personality trait and the toxoplasmosis can even be caused by an independent correlation of both the probability of Toxoplasma-infection and the personality trait with the third factor, namely with the size of living place of a subject. To test these two alternative hypotheses, we studied the influence of another neurotropic pathogen, the cytomegalovirus, on the personality of infected subjects, and reanalyzed the original data after the effect of the potential confounder, the size of living place, was controlled. METHODS: In the case-control study, 533 conscripts were tested for toxoplasmosis and presence of anti-cytomegalovirus antibodies and their novelty seeking was examined with Cloninger's TCI questionnaire. Possible association between the two infections and TCI dimensions was analyzed. RESULTS: The decrease of novelty seeking is associated also with cytomegalovirus infection. After the size of living place was controlled, the effect of toxoplasmosis on novelty seeking increased. Significant difference in novelty seeking was observed only in the largest city, Prague. CONCLUSION: Toxoplasma and cytomegalovirus probably induce a decrease of novelty seeking. As the cytomegalovirus spreads in population by direct contact (not by predation as with Toxoplasma), the observed changes are the byproduct of brain infections rather than the result of manipulation activity of a parasite. Four independent lines of indirect evidence, namely direct measurement of neurotransmitter concentration in mice, the nature of behavioral changes in rodents, the nature of personality changes in humans, and the observed association between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis, suggest that the changes of dopamine concentration in brain could play a role in behavioral changes of infected hosts

The Human Phenotype Ontology in 2024: phenotypes around the world

\ua9 The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research. The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a widely used resource that comprehensively organizes and defines the phenotypic features of human disease, enabling computational inference and supporting genomic and phenotypic analyses through semantic similarity and machine learning algorithms. The HPO has widespread applications in clinical diagnostics and translational research, including genomic diagnostics, gene-disease discovery, and cohort analytics. In recent years, groups around the world have developed translations of the HPO from English to other languages, and the HPO browser has been internationalized, allowing users to view HPO term labels and in many cases synonyms and definitions in ten languages in addition to English. Since our last report, a total of 2239 new HPO terms and 49235 new HPO annotations were developed, many in collaboration with external groups in the fields of psychiatry, arthrogryposis, immunology and cardiology. The Medical Action Ontology (MAxO) is a new effort to model treatments and other measures taken for clinical management. Finally, the HPO consortium is contributing to efforts to integrate the HPO and the GA4GH Phenopacket Schema into electronic health records (EHRs) with the goal of more standardized and computable integration of rare disease data in EHRs

Characterization of the suppressor gene of powdery mildew resistance gene Pm8 in common wheat [Triticum aestivum L.] cv. Regina

The Czech winter wheat cv. Regina which does not possess specific genes for powdery mildew resistance except Pm5 was crossed with the cvs. Florida, Tjelvar, Agra, Olymp and Sabina, all possessing T1BL-1RS and the dominant suppressor SuPm8, with Riebesel 47/51 possessing substitution 1R-1B and SuPm8 and with the T1BL-1RS cvs. Sparta, Iris, Mona without SuPm8. Powdery mildew isolates avirulent on Pm8 and virulent on other Pm genes were used in the trials. Tests for resistance were carried out either on seedlings at the first leaf stage or on detached leaves cultured on benzimidazolagar. No segregation for resistant plants in F₂ of all crosses of the cv. Regina with cultivars possessing T1BL-1RS and SuPm8 indicates that Regina has SuPm8. The segregation ratio 3 resistant: 13 susceptible in the F₂ population of crosses between the cv. Regina and cultivars possessing T1BL-1RS and no SuPm8 also confirms the presence of SuPm8 in the cv. Regina. The obtained results also indicate that expression of Pm2 and Pm4b is not affected by SuPm8 and that SuPm8 does not affect stem rust resistance gene Sr31 located on 1RS segment

Transformations through sport: The case of capoeira and basketball

The third phase of the AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging (TLang) project focuses on the theme of Sport. The Key Participant in Leeds is Tiago from Mozambique who is involved in capoeira and basketball, which gives our case study a dual focus. It should be noted that our analysis of both sets of sessions, capoeira and basketball, while kept roughly in parallel in the report, also reflects the different opportunities and affordances of the activities: capoeira for example provided notable opportunities for participants to learn Portuguese, while there was no such obvious equivalent in basketball. In Section One we introduce the case study, then in Section Two we introduce Tiago and look at the role that basketball and capoeira has played in his transformations and ideological becoming when he was growing up in Mozambique but also since he moved to England. We see how sport has always played a central shaping role in his life. Next in Section Three we introduce the two sports, basketball and capoeira (though as we shall see, capoeira, designated a UNESCO World Heritage treasure, is something more multi-layered than just a sport). In Section Four we review some of the themes that have cut across the TLang case studies so far: the work/home dynamic, the dynamics and politics of space, including borrowed space, entrepreneurship and precarity (finding a place and transforming what one knows, is and can do into something marketable), and finally of course a reflection on sport in relation to the core themes of our project, translanguaging, mobility, globalization and superdiversity. We show how Tiago, caught in the trap of precarious hourly paid work, is striving to transform an activity he loves, capoeira, into something he could earn a living by. The challenge of the Sports case study methodologically lay in the fact that we were dealing with highly visual data which could only really be captured on video. Additionally, due to difficulties in sound recording we were further led to consider the dynamic interaction of visual, verbal and embodied action rather than extensive analysis of spoken data. In Section Five we therefore focus on methodological issues concerned with obtaining and working with such visual data. In the first part of Section Six, we look at the event structure of both capoeira and basketball sessions, then go on to provide more detailed analysis of video data. In the case of capoeira we focus on the roda stage, which is the culmination of each session; in the case of basketball, we look at the lead up to an actual game: warm up, practice and strategy setting. In the final part of this section we look at the language learning opportunities afforded by participation in the capoeira group, and interaction both in English and Brazilian Portuguese with a marked Afro-Brazilian inflection. This is both through the songs and chants that are characteristic of capoeira, but also the language of instruction and regulation of the activity, where Portuguese/English translanguaging is often in evidence. In Section Seven we briefly conclude the case study