El fomento de la autonomía y el trabajo en grupo en el aprendizaje de lenguas para traductores a través de un entorno virtual de trabajo

En este artículo se aborda la cuestión de la importancia del aprendizaje autónomo y del trabajo en equipo como medios para optimizar el aprendizaje e intensificar las relaciones existentes entre las distintas materias de un programa de estudios. Para ilustrar esta propuesta, se propone un ejemplo de método de trabajo y de procedimientos y medios aplicados en el marco de la asignatura Alemán Lengua C. En este caso, y como herramienta para fomentar e incentivar el trabajo en grupo, se ha recurrido al entorno visual BSCW. Con relación a este entorno, se ofrecen ejemplos de las distintas funciones del sistema, tanto aquellas que fomentan la autonomía en el aprendizaje y el trabajo en equipo como las que facilitan la tutorización y el seguimiento del aprendizaje. Por último, se incluye un ejemplo de cómo el entorno BSCW puede contribuir a mejorar la expresión escrita.This article deals with the issues of self learning and team work as methodology to optimise learning and intensify the existing relationship between different curricular subjects within a teaching programme. In order to illustrate the proposal an example of the work method is given; along with procedures and applied media within the framework of a German -- as second foreign language -- language class. In this case, the visual environment BSCW has been used as a tool to trigger and promote team work. Regarding the BSCW environment, examples are offered of the many system functions: those which promote learning autonomy and team work, and also those which facilitate tutoring and follow up of the learning activity. Lastly an example is included on how the environment of BSCW can contribute to improve the written work

Vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language: from a theoretical framework to an actual implementation

This paper sets out with a brief overview on findings from different research areas such as cognitive psychology and corpus linguistics that are relevant to the understanding of vocabulary acquisition, reaching the conclusion that the relatedness of lexical units is a crucial aspect both for their meaning in the mental lexicon and on the level of usage. It then analyses how these findings can be applied to the development of lexical competence. The last part of the paper illustrates the application of several of the issues described in the previous sections through a vocabulary-oriented task involving the use of corporaEste artículo tiene como objetivo resumir algunos fundamentos de la adquisición de vocabulario procedentes de disciplinas varias como la psicología cognitiva y la lingüística de corpus, así como analizar las repercusiones de estos conocimientos sobre el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Los enfoques presentados convergen en la idea de la interrelación y dependencia mutua de las unidades léxicas, tanto en el léxico mental como en el nivel del uso, por lo que la última parte del trabajo está dedicada a ilustrar esta cuestión con un ejemplo de actividad didáctica basada en corpus que retoma y aplica varios de los aspectos descrito

Using corpus methodology for semantic and pragmatic analyses: What can corpora tell us about the linguistic expression of emotions?

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of lan- guage in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion con- cepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exem- plary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses’ lexical approach and Stefanowitsch’s meta- phorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic prosody. The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advan- tages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion con- cepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with infor- mation from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by reveal- ing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying re- sults, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contras- tive studies

Building Professional Awareness in the Cyberage: The World of Professional Translation and Interpreting in the German Speaking Countries

Within the overall framework of the Cibertaaal project, the task El mundo profesional de la traducción y la interpretación en Alemania2 was designed for second-year Translation students who learn German as a second foreign language. Their average level of proficiency in German, according to the European Frame of Reference at the time of completing the task, was A2/B1. Translating from German into their native Spanish or Catalan is the main objective of the curriculum for the second foreign language in a Translation degree, which turns reading comprehension into the most important aspect of the language courses that precede the actual training in translation. This focus on developing reading strategies as well as the pre-intermediate level of proficiency of this group of students makes them the ideal target group for a cybertask as outlined in the previous chapters

Emotions in motion. Towards a corpus-based description of the diachronic evolution of anger words

This paper outlines some of the challenges and possibilities of a corpus-based approach to the diachronic description of the semantics of emotion words. It analyses three German anger words (Wut, Zorn and Ärger) in two corpora: DTA (Deutsches Textarchiv, covering the period 1600-1899) and DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, which covers twentieth-century German). The study is based on two complementary approaches: a semantic and pragmatic analysis of co-occurrences (Oster, 2012); and the use of semantic foci (Ogarkova & Soriano, 2014). This allows for a detailed description of the semantic evolution of the three anger words for four aspects of emotion – Control, Lack of Control, Visibility and Internalization – while exploring the advantages of a combined quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis

Eating and drinking seen through translation: A study of food-related translation difficulties and techniques in a parallel corpus of literary texts

[EN] This paper presents an exploratory study on translators¿ decisions when en- countering food-related translation difficulties in a parallel corpus of German original narra- tive texts and their translations into Spanish and Catalan. For this purpose, all food- and drink-related lexemes in the German original texts were extracted and classified in semantic groups. As a second step, the source and target text fragments of lexemes related to food- related cultural referents, metaphorical expressions or ways of eating and drinking were ex- tracted and analysed in view of the techniques applied by the translators of both language combinations. The results obtained through the classification and quantification of the trans- lation techniques in these three domains allow conclusions to be drawn regarding a) the existence of foreignizing or domesticating tendencies in the translation of food terms, b) the ways translators deal with action verbs that encompass multiple meaning aspects and c) the degree of metaphoricity and food-relatedness in the translation of metaphorical ex- pressions.This study has been supported by research projects FFI2012–35239, funded by the Spanish Ministry for the Economy and Competition, and P1-1B2013-44, funded by Universitat Jaume I.Oster, U.; Molés-Cases, T. (2016). Eating and drinking seen through translation: A study of food-related translation difficulties and techniques in a parallel corpus of literary texts. Across Languages and Cultures. 17(1):53-75. doi:10.1556/084.2016.17.1.3S537517

Cloning and characterisation of chlorophyll synthase from Avena sativa

The chlorophyll synthase gene from oat (Avena sativa) was cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli. The deduced amino acid sequence consists of 378 amino acids including a presequence, of 46 amino acids. Deletion mutants show that a core protein comprising amino acid residues 88 to 377 is enzymatically active. The sequence of the mature protein shows 85% identity with the chlorophyll synthase of Arabidopsis thaliana and 62% identity with the chlorophyll synthase of Synechocystis PCC 6803. The gene is constitutively expressed as the same transcript level is found in dark-grown and in light-grown seedlings. The enzyme requires magnesium ions for activity; manganese ions can reconstitute only part of the activity. Diacetyl and N-phenylmaleimide (NPM) inhibit the enzyme activity. Site-directed mutagenesis reveals that, out of the 4 Arg residues present in the active core protein, Arg-91 and Arg-161 are essential for the activity. Five cysteine residues are present in the core protein, of which only Cys-109 is essential for the enzyme activity. Since the wild-type and all other Cys-mutants with the exception of the mutant C304A are inhibited by N-phenylmaleimide, we conclude that the inhibitor binds to a non-essential Cys residue to abolish activity. The role of the various Arg and Cys residues is discussed