Puzzling it out - Creating web-based teaching materials to support translation classes

pp.229-23

Il contributo della prospettiva sociologica sulla traduzione alla formazione e all'ethos professionale del traduttore specializzato

pp.1-13Research on translation in general, and on specialised translation in particular, has long abandoned a purely linguistic perspective and has embraced principles and methodologies coming from neighbouring disciplines such as terminology, cognitive psychology, philosophy and sociology. The translator’s job is today seen as an activity where considerations of a purely linguistic nature are often accompanied, if not superseded, by a wide array of considerations that were traditionally thought to pertain to the extra-linguistic sphere (and therefore seen as lying outside the scope of studies of translation). The paper provides a brief overview of recent discussions of the two notions of “translation norm” and “translation competence”, seen from an essentially sociological perspective. Reference is made to how such discussions can positively contribute to the teaching of translation, and implications are drawn for a redefinition of the professional translator’s status

Question Time: Comparing and contrasting parliamentary questions in Britain, Italy and the EU

Following the recent tradition of research on situations of language contact and, in particular, on the reciprocal influences between languages in terms of textual patterns and argumentative and rhetorical structures, the paper reports on the analysis of a small corpus of parliamentary questions, observed in two different settings, one national (Italy) and one supranational (the European Parliament). More specifically, the analyzed corpus includes: 1) written questions by MPs in the two Chambers of the Italian Parliament; 2) written questions in Italian by Italian MEPs; 3) written questions tabled by British MEPs and translated into Italian. The aim of the analysis was to identify the possible influence exerted by the supranational context on the lexical and syntactic make-up of the texts produced by Italian MEPs. The results show that, especially from the point of view of syntax and discourse structure, questions by Italian MEPs are closer to the translated questions than to the questions tabled in the Italian Parliament

Sequeval: A Framework to Assess and Benchmark Sequence-based Recommender Systems

In this paper, we present sequeval, a software tool capable of performing the offline evaluation of a recommender system designed to suggest a sequence of items. A sequence-based recommender is trained considering the sequences already available in the system and its purpose is to generate a personalized sequence starting from an initial seed. This tool automatically evaluates the sequence-based recommender considering a comprehensive set of eight different metrics adapted to the sequential scenario. sequeval has been developed following the best practices of software extensibility. For this reason, it is possible to easily integrate and evaluate novel recommendation techniques. sequeval is publicly available as an open source tool and it aims to become a focal point for the community to assess sequence-based recommender systems.Comment: REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender System

When a Clue is not a Clue. A corpus-driven study of explicit vs. implicit signalling of sentence links in popular economics translation

Lo studio si propone di analizzare la traduzione di una particolare categoria di elementi coesivi, i connettori interfrasali, in un corpus di articoli di argomento economico tratti da quotidiani e riviste specializzate tradotti dall’inglese in italiano. Lo studio mette in rapporto i risultati sulla frequenza dei connettori con quelli derivanti dall’analisi di un corpus comparabile di articoli scritti originariamente in italiano. Soffermandosi in particolare sui casi di esplicitazione traduttiva tramite l’inserimento di connettori non presenti nel testo di partenza, lo studio conclude che tale esplicitazione può, da un lato, essere collegata al tentativo dei traduttori di uniformarsi a una norma di produzione testuale tipica dell’italiano e, dall’altro, essere considerata come spia del processo di decodifica dell’informazione (spesso di carattere specialistico) veicolata dall’originale

Making Sense of the Response to COVID-19 in Higher Education: A Case Study of Crisis Communication in Two Universities

The COVID-19 pandemic brought extreme challenges and disruption to higher education, resulting in hurried adoption of online teaching. From the point of view of crisis communication, the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in HE institutions represents an interesting case, because crisis management and communication were primarily, if not exclusively, directed at internal stakeholders (essentially, students and staff ). We present a case study that compares and contrasts the COVID-related responses of two different universities: the University of Minnesota, in the U.S., and the University of Trieste, in Italy. In particular, we look at the sets of documents issued by the leadership of these universities over a period of 23 months between February 2020 (the start of the health crisis) and December 2021. The analysis of the documents revealed that unexpected spaces of freedom empowered instructors. We identify four discursive traits associated with these spaces: definitional change, code glossing, and the use of engagement markers and permissives. However, this empowerment changed over time, as universities became eager to go back to “normal” and reinstate restrictions from pre-pandemic times