The Sociolinguistics of Translating Canonical Religious Texts

The sociolinguistics of Translating Canonical Religious Texts — Discussions of the theory and practice of translating have largely neglected the sociolinguistic factors in translating. This is particularly true in the case of religious texts, in which problems of textual variants, historical criticism, the power of tradition, the tensions between form and content, orality, format, diversities of genres, and interpretive notes play such an important role. As a result, multiple translations of such texts are generally required because of the diverse backgrounds of readers and the various uses of religious texts, for example, study, devotion, proclamation, and liturgy.La sociolinguistique de ta traduction des textes religieux canoniques — Les facteurs sociolinguistiques sont souvent négligés dans les études théoriques et pratiques de la traduction. C'est tout particulièrement le cas des textes religieux, où les problèmes de variantes textuelles, de critique historique, la puissance de la tradition, les tensions entre la forme et le contenu, l'oralité, la présentation du texte, les différents genres et les notes explicatives jouent un rôle très important. Il en résulte que de multiples traductions sont en général nécessaires en raison des différents arrière-plans des lecteurs et des utilisations des textes religieux (étude, prière, cérémonies, liturgie)

1953 Payton Lectures: Anthropology and Missions

Fuller Theological Seminary instituted the Payton Lectures in 1948, providing for a series of divinity lectures by a notable scholar outside the regular faculty. The lectureship is named for Dr. John E. and Mrs. Eliza Payton, parents of the late Mrs. Grace Fuller, wife of seminary founder Charles E. Fuller. El Seminario Teológico de Fuller instituyó las Conferencias Payton en 1948, proveyendo una serie de conferencias en divinidades por una persona erudita de renombre fuera de la facultad regular. Las conferencias llevan el nombre del Dr. John E. y la Sra. Eliza Payton, padres de la fallecida Sra. Grace Fuller, esposa del fundador del seminario Charles E. Fuller. 풀러신학대학원은 1948년 페이튼 강좌를 개설하여 정규 교수진 외에 저명한 학자의 신학 강연을 제공해왔습니다. 강좌의 명칭은 학교 설립자 찰스 풀러 (Charles E. Fuller)의 아내인 그레이스 풀러 (Grace Fuller) 부인의 양친 존 페이튼 (John E. Payton) 박사와 엘리자 페이튼 (Eliza Payton) 부인의 이름을 따라 붙여졌습니다

A comparative investigation of young children's recall memory proficiency in naturalistic and laboratory settings

The present study was designed to compare young children's recall-memory proficiency in naturalistic settings of the home and preschool classroom with their performance in the laboratory setting. The study also focused on the reliability of children's recall performance within each of these settings. Seventy-two 4-year-old children deemed by teachers to be of average intellectual and social maturity were exposed to three different but comparable sets of 12 stimulus pictures comprised of six functional (child's world) and six neutral objects. Each child was shown one picture set each day by the presenter in a testing room and then later in the day tested for recall of the object names either by the experimenter in the testing room (one day), by the child's preschool teacher in the preschool classroom (another day), or by the child's mother at home (another day). Thus, over the three testing days the children were tested for recall by three different adults, each interacting with the child in an appropriate context

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Understanding the meaning

This article provides an overview of the nature of meaning, emphasizing the associative character of lexical meanings. The essay also comments on the meaning-related difficulties the translator must often overcome in order to reach a coherent interpretation due to the dubious quality of many original texts. The author illustrates this point through texts from the European Union. He also discusses some exceptional situations, especially regarding religious and traditional texts such as the Lord’s Prayer, whose formal power, including the magical ring of words, seems to outshine the alleged universal need for coherence and signification. Thus, any attempt to promote an alternative translation is systematically rejected because although the new version might be more meaningful, it would also go against the symbolic power of the coined formula.En este artículo se realiza un repaso de la naturaleza del significado, con énfasis en el carácter asociativo de los significados léxicos. Igualmente, se comentan las dificultades semánticas que el traductor debe superar en múltiples ocasiones, ilustrándolas a través de textos de la Unión Europea, para poder alcanzar una interpretación coherente debido a la discutible calidad de muchos textos originales. También se comentan situaciones excepcionales, especialmente en textos de carácter religioso y de gran tradición como el “Padre Nuestro”, donde el poder formal, incluso la magia de las palabras parece eclipsar la supuesta necesidad universal de coherencia y significación, de tal manera que se rechaza cualquier intento de traducción alternativa porque aunque pueda resultar más significativa también quebraría el poder simbólico de la fórmula acuñada