This thesis presents the findings of a study that investigated the teaching and learning of English in female government schools in the United Arab Emirates. The research was conducted by means of qualitative methods and 61 participants participated in the interviews. The research sample represents the three main parties that are directly concerned with teaching and learning English and they are: schoolteachers, school graduates, and higher education teachers. The investigation reveals three main aspects of English language teaching and learning at school. First, schoolteachers use ineffective grammar-translation methods with some principles from the direct and communicative methods. Second, school graduates have negative perceptions of English language teaching at schools and blame it on their failure to learn the language. Finally, tertiary institutions receive school graduates with poor English. There are a number of factors that affect teachers' performance in the English class. First, the syllabus is prescriptive and there is a heavy emphasis on textbooks and exams. Second, teachers operate according to a given scheme, which prioritizes high success rates in English as a school subject, and de-emphasizes English as a medium of communication. This has led to restricting teachers' autonomy and causing stagnation in the process of learning English. Also due to teachers' beliefs and other overwhelming circumstances, they resorted to the transmission model to deliver information to exam takers rather than language learners. The abovementioned conditions reflect negatively on students' attitudes, motivation, and learning style. However, they cling to a small amount of instrumental motivation that energizes them to study for the exam. Although many students are aware of the importance of English, they are not given an opportunity to learn it appropriately, which lowers their motivation substantially. Additionally, the English classroom lacks a humane classroom environment.

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In state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation systems (SMT), modelling phrase reorderings is an important need to enhance naturalness of the translate outputs, particularly when the grammatical structures of the language pairs differ significantly. The challenge in developing machine learning methods for machine translation can be summarised in two points. First is the ability to characterise language features such as morphology, syntax and semantics. Second is adapting complex learning algorithms to process large corpora. Posing phrase movements as a classification problem, we exploit recent developments in solving large-scale SVM, Multiclass SVM and Multinomial Logistic Regression. Using dual coordinate descent methods for learning, we provide a mechanism to shrink the amount of training data required for each iteration. Hence, we produce significant saving in time and memory while preserving the accuracy of the models. These efficient classifiers allow us to build large-scale discriminative reordering models. We also explore a generative learning approach namely naive Bayes. Our Bayesian model is shown to be superior to the widely-used lexicalised reordering model. It is fast to train and the storage requirement is many times smaller than the lexicalised model. Although discriminative models might achieve higher accuracy than naive Bayes, the absence of iterative learning is a critical advantage for very large corpora. Our reordering models are fully integrated with the Moses machine translation system, widely used in the community. Evaluated in large-scale translation tasks, our model have proved successful for two very different language pairs: Arabic-English and German-English.

This study investigates the translation of the well-known Harry Potter fantasy series in the context of translation of children’s literature from English into Arabic; from 2002 this series was translated into Arabic by an Egyptian publishing company specialising in children’s literature. This area is still relatively unexplored in Arabic and in need of further research, given the great degree of difference between these two languages. The main foci of this study are the deletions, summarisations (actual textual or linguistic units that are deleted) and omissions (meaning or semantic load that is omitted) that occur in the Arabic translation of the series. A contrastive analysis is carried out between the ST and the TT in order to identify, examine and discuss trends in translation (deletions, summarisations and omissions). The study reveals that there are a great many deletions and omissions, particularly in the early books (1-4), and specifically in Book two. The study reveals that these trends are, in fact, strongly related and directly linked to norms, conventions and the level of professionalism of translation of children’s literature in the Arab world. This study also shows that didacticism is still one of the main features of translating children’s literature into Arabic. The study views translators’ interventions as part of systems and norms in order to situate the text in the receiving culture, thus creating an acceptable TT to an Arab child whose presumed cognitive ability is underestimated in the TT in comparison with the ST. However, these deletions and omissions certainly have an effect on the translations of the texts. Therefore, the aim of this research is to examine the impact and effect of these trends on the translation of the Harry Potter series as a whole.

This thesis involves a comparative lexico-grammatical analysis of third-year student writing belonging to the Essay genre family (Nesi and Gardner, 2012) in two disciplines, History and PIR (Politics and International Relations), from two UK higher educational institutions. The project adopts a corpus-driven approach which was developed by Groom (2007) in his analysis of professional academic writing in Literature and History: statistically significant grammatical words are identified using a keyness analysis, and the phraseological patterning around these grammatical keywords is then qualitatively analysed and phraseologies are categorised according to their semantic purposes. In the project five grammatical keywords - of, and, that, as and this - were analysed across four sub-corpora each consisting of student writing from one of the two disciplines at one of the two institutions. It was found that there were more similarities than there were variations in the semantic patterning of grammatical keywords across the four disciplinary/institutional sub-corpora, and that these similarities could to a large extent be explained in terms of the shared features of student Humanities and Social Sciences writing (Durrant, 2015). The variations that occurred fell along disciplinary rather than institutional lines and it is argued that, with regards to both similarities and differences, in the case of these two disciplines at the two target institutions, discipline seems to override institution as an influence at lexico-grammatical level on the nature of student academic writing. It is also argued that Groom’s (2007) approach is an extremely useful one to take in analysis of student writing as it uncovers lexico-grammatical features which occur extremely regularly within student texts and thus, from a pedagogical perspective, are of high value in terms of how much of the text they ‘operationalize’ (Bruce, 2011, p. 6).

Received Pronunciation (RP) has been widely described linguistically (Wells 1982, 1991, 1997), although little sociolinguistic research has been carried out on it (Fabricius 2000). Over the last few years, a new trend has been observed in young RP speakers to incorporate non-standard features in their accent, such as t-glottalling (Fabricius 2000). This quantitative sociophonetic study analyses to what extent t-glottalling is present in the speech of young RP speakers and which are the linguistic and social constraints that affect its variability. The data are based on sociolinguistic interviews of 20 teenagers, aged between 13 and 17, from three different types of schools in the South of England: a major public (private) boarding school, a private non-boarding school and an outstanding rated comprehensive school in a prosperous rural area. These data are complemented by 15 older speakers, aged 27, who are ex-alumni of the schools under study. The quantitative data are analysed through multivariate analysis using Varbrul. This thesis aims at re-visiting t-glottalling, a widely researched linguistic variable, from an innovative perspective, by splitting the dataset into word-medial and word-final and by analysing a wide range of linguistic factors, which have often been overlooked in previous studies of t-glottalling in British accents. The linguistic constraints analysed in the study are: preceding and following phonological environment (with types of consonants and types of vowels), style, grammatical category, stress, number of syllables and lexical frequency. As for the social constraints, they include type of school (used as a proxy for social class), age and gender. Results show that young RP speakers are being conservative in terms of word-medial t-glottalling, whereas in word-final contexts, they are being innovative and language change is in progress, especially in the word-final pre-pausal and pre-vocalic (back vowels) phonological environments. Furthermore, lexical frequency seems to be playing a role in the different progressing stages of the glottal stop word-internally and across word boundaries. Finally, this research shows that type of school is a crucial factor in explaining the variability of the glottal stop in this accent, with teenagers from the comprehensive and private non-boarding schools being the ones who are leading the changes of t-glottalling in young RP and with those speakers belonging to the most elitist private boarding schools resisting considerably the adoption of t-glottalling. This thesis examines how different RP is in middle, middle-upper and upper class youth today, as well as analyses the state of RP in the current generation, to see if there are any changes in progress. Another variant has been found in the analysis, which has shown a new and interesting development in young RP: taps. This may suggest that new non-standard features might be making their way into young RP speech. Moreover, this study aims to re-evaluate RP as a label and revise the relationship between social class and language variation, by discussing new approaches in the social class literature and by drawing concepts and ideas from the sociology of education and the sociology of the elites to understand the nature of RP as a social accent.

The main aim of this thesis is to examine translation practices in Saudi Arabia as “socially situated” activities in the second half of the 20th century. Drawing on Bourdieu’s sociological model, the study situates the translation activities of academic, private, and literary institutions in their socio-political context of cultural production. Conceptual tools of analysis derived from Bourdieu, such as field, habitus, capital, doxa, and homology, are used to analyse book translation as a set of emerging sub-fields in Saudi Arabia.The study identifies academic institutions and private publishers as the principal agents contributing to the definition of the field of translation. It analyses the positions they occupy in the field(s) of cultural production and types of capital that have value in the context of their struggles. An expanding range of translation practices by faculty members in academic institutions, especially those undertaken in King Saud University, points to an emerging network of translation-specific positions, which can be referred to as the sub-field of academic translation. The dictates of this sub-field are influenced by strong homologous relations with the encompassing academic field. The capital sought by agents is primarily cultural and symbolic, and is readily convertible to economic capital.The thesis also identifies three private publishers who occupy positions in the second emerging sub-field of translation within the publishing field. These agents display different interests in a variety of stakes and types of capital. Jarir’s focus on translating self-help books demonstrates a heavy influence of the heteronomous dictates of the local and global markets, i.e. the economic field, situating it within the heteronomous pole of large scale circulation. Translation practices undertaken by Dar al-Mareekh and Obeikan position them nearer to the autonomous pole of small-scale circulation, where agents target smaller groups of readership and prioritise cultural and symbolic forms of capital. A heteronomous influence exercised by the political field is also detected in Obeikan’s focus on political works critical of US foreign policy, which situates these products within the heteronomous pole of politics.A translation by Obeikan of Niall Ferguson’s 2004 Colossus is examined in detail as a case study to further illuminate translation strategies as sociological phenomena situated within the field of power. Paratextual engagements reflect discourses of anti-Americanism that have circulated in the Saudi social space since US presence in the Kingdom intensified in 1990. The concepts of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are used to analyse a series of textual interventions at the micro level. Typographic signalling of censored sections that undermine the political authorities is found to reflect the agent’s positioning in relation to the heterodoxic, pro-American stance in the political field. The publisher’s position in this respect aligns with and reflects the orthodoxic stance of the pan-Islamist, religious-cum-nationalist field, whose agents have protested the continued military cooperation between the Kingdom and the US.

In der Dolmetschgeschichte als relativ junger Teilbereich der Translationswissenschaft sind bis heute noch viele Fragen unbeantwortet. Dies ist wohl vor allem darin begründet, dass aufgrund des zwingend mündlichen Charakters des Dolmetschens nur sehr schwer verlässliche Quellen zu finden sind. Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt in dieser Forschungslücke an und soll einen Einblick in die Ausbildung von Dolmetschern vergangener Zeiten gewähren. Die gängigste Methode, um Dolmetscher mit entsprechenden Sprach- und Kulturkenntnissen heranzuziehen, war wohl die Entsendung von Kindern und Jugendlichen ins Ausland – den sogenannten Jeunes de Langues. Das Ziel der Arbeit ist die Sammlung von Daten über diese Kinder und Jugendlichen sowie deren systematische Aufbereitung in Form eines Kataloges. Dabei wird kein Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit erhoben, es kann jedoch nachgewiesen werden, dass die Praxis der Jeunes de Langues vom Altertum, über Mittelalter und Kolonialzeitalter bis in die Frühe Neuzeit in verschiedensten Epochen und Kulturkreisen praktiziert wurde. Es wurden zeitgenössische Reiseberichte, Tagebücher und Korrespondenzen sowie Sekundärliteratur verschiedenster Fachbereiche auf Erwähnungen der Jeunes des Langues untersucht. Eine detaillierte Auseinandersetzung mit einzelnen Schicksalen kann in diesem Rahmen aufgrund der schwierigen Quellenlagen und des begrenzten Umfangs nicht dargelegt werden. Vom allgemeinen Standpunkt aus werden jedoch Vorteile und Nachteile sowie die komplexen Themen der Loyalität und Freiwilligkeit der Jeunes de Langues anhand der gesammelten Daten analysiert. Somit wird deutlich, dass die Jeunes de Langues nicht nur für die Dolmetschwissenschaft interessant sind – als Sprach- und Kulturmittler kommt ihnen auch im historischen Kontext eine große Bedeutung zu, die es in Zukunft noch weiter zu erforschen gilt.:1. Einleitung 2. Überblick über wichtige Epochen der Dolmetschgeschichte 2.1 Altertum 2.1.1 Altes Ägypten 2.1.2 Antikes Griechenland 2.1.3 Antikes Rom 2.2 Mittelalter 2.3 Frühe Neuzeit 2.4 Neuere Geschichte 3. Zur Zuverlässigkeit und Verfügbarkeit von Quellen 3.1 Anleitung zur Benutzung des Katalogs der Jeunes de Langue 4. Die Jeunes de Langue – Elitephänomen oder Ausbeuterei? 4.1 Begriffsdefinition 4.2 Vorteile und Beweggründe 4.3 Hindernisse und Rückschläge 4.4 Der Loyalitätskonflikt 4.5 Die Frage der Freiwilligkeit 5. Fazit 6. Forschungsausblick 7. Literaturverzeichnis Anhang – Katalog der Jeunes de Langue