The Book of Ruth and Song of Songs in the First Hebrew Translation of The Taming of the Shrew

This article investigates the earliest Hebrew rendition of a Shakespearean comedy, Judah Elkind’s מוסר סוררה musar sorera ‘The Education of the Rebellious Woman’ (The Taming of the Shrew), which was translated directly from the English source text and published in Berditchev in 1892. Elkind’s translation is the only comedy among a small group of pioneering Shakespeare renditions conducted in late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe by adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment movement. It was rooted in a strongly ideological initiative to establish a modern European-style literature in Hebrew and reflecting Jewish cultural values at a time when the language was still primarily a written medium on the cusp of its large-scale revernacularisation in Palestine. The article examines the ways in which Elkind’s employment of a Judaising translation technique drawing heavily on romantic imagery from prominent biblical intertexts, particularly the Book of Ruth and the Song of Songs, affects the Petruchio and Katherine plotline in the target text. Elkind’s use of carefully selected biblical names for the main characters and his conscious insertion of biblical verses well known in Jewish tradition for their romantic connotations serve to transform Petruchio and Katherine into Peretz and Hoglah, the heroes of a distinctly Jewish love story which offers a unique and intriguing perspective on the translation of Shakespearean comedy

Contemporary Haredi Yiddish Bilingual Pedagogical Materials

This article examines Hebrew- and English-medium pedagogical materials aimed at Haredi learners of Yiddish. Our main findings are 1) the materials are produced by and for the community, which reflects the commonly held Haredi view that knowledge of Yiddish is a key element of in-group identity and therefore must be maintained and taught, 2) the learning materials tend to adopt an inductive approach informed by the traditional Ashkenazic taytsh educational model, where forms and structures are absorbed through exposure, rather than a deductive one, which differs from most non-Haredi Yiddish pedagogical resources, 3) some features (e.g., personal pronouns) presented in the materials are more conservative than those typically used in spoken Haredi Yiddish, and there is considerable variation among the different resources vis-à-vis the grammatical elements presented (e.g., noun case and gender, which supports earlier research demonstrating that these features are absent from or in flux in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish)

Moving away from the "unit cost". Predicting country-specific average cost curves of VMMC services accounting for variations in service delivery platforms in sub-Saharan Africa.

BACKGROUND: One critical element to optimize funding decisions involves the cost and efficiency implications of implementing alternative program components and configurations. Program planners, policy makers and funders alike are in need of relevant, strategic data and analyses to help them plan and implement effective and efficient programs. Contrary to widely accepted conceptions in both policy and academic arenas, average costs per service (so-called "unit costs") vary considerably across implementation settings and facilities. The objective of this work is twofold: 1) to estimate the variation of VMMC unit costs across service delivery platforms (SDP) in Sub-Saharan countries, and 2) to develop and validate a strategy to extrapolate unit costs to settings for which no data exists. METHODS: We identified high-quality VMMC cost studies through a literature review. Authors were contacted to request the facility-level datasets (primary data) underlying their results. We standardized the disparate datasets into an aggregated database which included 228 facilities in eight countries. We estimated multivariate models to assess the correlation between VMMC unit costs and scale, while simultaneously accounting for the influence of the SDP (which we defined as all possible combinations of type of facility, ownership, urbanicity, and country), on the unit cost variation. We defined SDP as any combination of such four characteristics. Finally, we extrapolated VMMC unit costs for all SDPs in 13 countries, including those not contained in our dataset. RESULTS: The average unit cost was 73 USD (IQR: 28.3, 100.7). South Africa showed the highest within-country cost variation, as well as the highest mean unit cost (135 USD). Uganda and Namibia had minimal within-country cost variation, and Uganda had the lowest mean VMMC unit cost (22 USD). Our results showed evidence consistent with economies of scale. Private ownership and Hospitals were significant determinants of higher unit costs. By identifying key cost drivers, including country- and facility-level characteristics, as well as the effects of scale we developed econometric models to estimate unit cost curves for VMMC services in a variety of clinical and geographical settings. CONCLUSION: While our study did not produce new empirical data, our results did increase by a tenfold the availability of unit costs estimates for 128 SDPs in 14 priority countries for VMMC. It is to our knowledge, the most comprehensive analysis of VMMC unit costs to date. Furthermore, we provide a proof of concept of the ability to generate predictive cost estimates for settings where empirical data does not exist

Developing the Global Health Cost Consortium Unit Cost Study Repository for HIV and TB: methodology and lessons learned.

Consistently defined, accurate, and easily accessible cost data are a valuable resource to inform efficiency analyses, budget preparation, and sustainability planning in global health. The Global Health Cost Consortium (GHCC) designed the Unit Cost Study Repository (UCSR) to be a resource for standardised HIV and TB intervention cost data displayed by key characteristics such as intervention type, country, and target population. To develop the UCSR, the GHCC defined a typology of interventions for each disease; aligned interventions according to the standardised principles, methods, and cost and activity categories from the GHCC Reference Case for Estimating the Costs of Global Health Services and Interventions; completed a systematic literature review; conducted extensive data extraction; performed quality assurance; grappled with complex methodological issues such as the proper approach to the inflation and conversion of costs; developed and implemented a study quality rating system; and designed a web-based user interface that flexibly displays large amounts of data in a user-friendly way. Key lessons learned from the extraction process include the importance of assessing the multiple uses of extracted data; the critical role of standardising definitions (particularly units of measurement); using appropriate classifications of interventions and components of costs; the efficiency derived from programming data checks; and the necessity of extraction quality monitoring by senior analysts. For the web interface, lessons were: understanding the target audiences, including consulting them regarding critical characteristics; designing the display of data in "levels"; and incorporating alert and unique trait descriptions to further clarify differences in the data

Contemporary research in minoritized and diaspora languages of Europe

This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil