Submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master’s Degree in Technology: Chiropractic, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2016. / Background: Neck pain is a condition that is becoming more common throughout the world and most people can expect to experience some degree of neck pain sometime during their life. There is a need for early diagnosis and follow-up of neck pain to assess a patient’s level of self-rated disability due to the escalating disability burden and compensation costs associated with neck pain. For this reason, disability questionnaires are increasingly used for clinical assessment and as an outcome measurement for the treatment of neck pain. Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of disability questionnaires have thus become increasingly necessary when dealing with different cultural groups. Methods: This is a quantitative validity and reliability assessment study comparing the English versions of the Neck Disability Index (NDI) and the Quadruple Visual Analogue Scale (QVAS) to their translated Afrikaans counterparts. The first step was to translate the questionnaires into Afrikaans. The translated questionnaires were then scrutinised and critiqued by an Expert group, who are fluent in both the Afrikaans and English languages, and back translated to English in order or establish their face validity. A small pilot study was conducted with the original and translated versions of the questionnaires to establish their content validity. The translated and original versions of the NDI and QVAS were given to a study group to complete with a suitable time delay between the completions of the questionnaires. The results from the study group were statistically analysed to establish concurrent validity and reliability. Results: There were 50 participants each completing one English NDI and QVAS and one Afrikaans NDI and QVAS. The results indicate high reliability for both the Afrikaans NDI (α = 0.900) and QVAS (α = 0.883). The Afrikaans NDI and QVAS are deemed reliable compared to their English counterparts. The results indicated a significant level of concurrent validity for both the NDI and the QVAS. Both the Afrikaans versions of the NDI and QVAS were deemed reliable and concurrent validity was established. The NDI and QVAS were successfully translated and the Afrikaans versions can now be used in the Afrikaans population as viable alternatives to the English NDI and QVAS. / M

Submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master’s Degree in Technology: Chiropractic, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2016. / Background: Neck pain is a condition that is becoming more common throughout the world and most people can expect to experience some degree of neck pain sometime during their life. There is a need for early diagnosis and follow-up of neck pain to assess a patient’s level of self-rated disability due to the escalating disability burden and compensation costs associated with neck pain. For this reason, disability questionnaires are increasingly used for clinical assessment and as an outcome measurement for the treatment of neck pain. Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of disability questionnaires have thus become increasingly necessary when dealing with different cultural groups. Methods: This is a quantitative validity and reliability assessment study comparing the English versions of the Neck Disability Index (NDI) and the Quadruple Visual Analogue Scale (QVAS) to their translated Afrikaans counterparts. The first step was to translate the questionnaires into Afrikaans. The translated questionnaires were then scrutinised and critiqued by an Expert group, who are fluent in both the Afrikaans and English languages, and back translated to English in order or establish their face validity. A small pilot study was conducted with the original and translated versions of the questionnaires to establish their content validity. The translated and original versions of the NDI and QVAS were given to a study group to complete with a suitable time delay between the completions of the questionnaires. The results from the study group were statistically analysed to establish concurrent validity and reliability. Results: There were 50 participants each completing one English NDI and QVAS and one Afrikaans NDI and QVAS. The results indicate high reliability for both the Afrikaans NDI (α = 0.900) and QVAS (α = 0.883). The Afrikaans NDI and QVAS are deemed reliable compared to their English counterparts. The results indicated a significant level of concurrent validity for both the NDI and the QVAS. Both the Afrikaans versions of the NDI and QVAS were deemed reliable and concurrent validity was established. The NDI and QVAS were successfully translated and the Afrikaans versions can now be used in the Afrikaans population as viable alternatives to the English NDI and QVAS. / M

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

While sickle cell disease (SCD) primarily affects those of African heritage, Latinos, the second most commonly affected group, are often not included in studies of youth with SCD. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to complete the linguistic translation validation of the PedsQL SCD Module, a recently validated disease specific quality of life (QOL) instrument, for use in Spanish speaking parents and youth with SCD (Aim 1). Using this instrument, QOL of Latino and African American youth with SCD who participated in an NIH funded study to improve adherence to hydroxyurea therapy (R21 NR013745) were compared (Aim 2) and factors associated with QOL examined (Aim 3). For Aim 1, 10 Latino youth with SCD (n = 5 age, 8-12 years; n = 5 age, 13-18 years) and their parents completed a demographic survey, Spanish version of PedsQL SCD Module and an audio-taped cognitive interview. Across age groups, all reported that the translated PedsQL Sickle Cell Disease Module was easy to understand and had minimal suggestions for further improvement. For Aims 2 and 3, secondary baseline data from 28 youth (mean age 13.6  2.4 years) with sickle cell disease and their parents who participated in the HABIT feasibility trial were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon Signed Rank and Mann-Whitney test, and linear regression modeling. Latino youth reported higher QOL scores than non-Latino youth for all QOL measures except for the Worry II subscale of the disease-specific QOL measure while Latino parents reported higher QOL scores than non-Latino parents for all subscales except for three: the disease-specific Worry I, Worry II, and Communication I subscales. Poorer disease specific QOL was predicted by greater youth-parent discordance regarding sickle cell disease responsibility for parents (β = -3.07, p = 0.04) but not youth. Poorer disease-specific QOL was predicted by greater number of both emergency room visits during the prior year for both youth (β = -2.89, p = 0.005 [self-report]; β = -5.07, p = 0.002 [electronic medical records]) and parents (β = -3.41, p = 0.002 [self-report]; β = -6.93, p = <0.001 [electronic medical records]) and hospitalizations during the prior year (youth β = -5.72, p = <0.001 [self-report]; β = -7.56, p = 0.03 [electronic medical records]; parents β = -6.48, p = <0.001 [self-report]; β = -9.16, p = 0.02 [electronic medical record]). Based on these findings, greater youth-parent discordance regarding sickle cell family responsibility and greater utilization of emergency rooms and/or hospitals were associated with poorer disease-specific QOL.

A web-aided query translation expansion method in Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is presented in this study. The method is applied to English/Chinese language pair, in which queries are expressed in English and the documents returned are in Chinese. Among the three main categories of CLIR methods of machine translation (MT), dictionary translation using a machine-readable dictionary (MRD), and parallel corpus, our method is based on the second one. MRD-based method is easy to implement. However, it faces the resource limitation problem, i.e., the dictionary is often incomplete leading to poor translation and hence undesirable results. By combining MRD and web-aided query translation expansion technique, good retrieval performance can be achieved. The performance gain is largely due to the successful translation extraction of relevant words of a query term from online texts. A new Chinese word discovery algorithm, which extracts words from continuous Chinese characters was designed and used for this purpose. The extracted relevant words do not only include the precise translation of a query term, but also those words that are relevant to that term in the source language. / Jin Honglan. / "October 2005." / Adviser: Kam Fai Wong. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: B, page: 3899. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-121). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Translation studies in Hong Kong have been focusing mainly on the literary aspect of the discipline. Although huge amounts of bilingual texts are churned out every year from virtually every government and quasi-government department and other institution, these products of translation, as well as the work processes involved, do not receive due attention of the academia for research purposes. Studies on translation of this type and nature may have largely been ignored. To promote academic studies in this field, this thesis attempts to establish Public Administration Translation as a genre which bears distinctive features and a production process of its own, although the linguistic features of this genre do not form part of the present study and are left for future exploration. To achieve this goal, a general history of Public Administration Translation in Hong Kong with regard to various grades of Public Administration Translation service providers has been compiled to track the development of these grades, as well as the relations among them. With a view to putting Hong Kong’s Public Administration Translation in a sociolinguistic perspective, a sociolinguistic framework regarding societal multilingualism types with reference to territorial monolingualism, bilingualism and trilingualism, as well as diglossia and triglossia, is proposed for discussing Hong Kong’s Public Administration Translation and its service providers. After detailed analysis and discussion, it is suggested that Hong Kong’s sociolinguistic situation has always been evolving in response to its political and demographic development, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region seems to be moving towards a society of biliteracy (i.e. Standard Written Chinese and written English) and trilingualism (i.e. Cantonese, spoken English and Putonghua) while Hong Kong’s Public Administration Translation keeps reacting accordingly to the changes in the sociolinguistic situation of the community. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This study investigated the conceptual blending processes that occurred during American Sign Language (ASL) interpretations. Using the framework of conceptual blending (Fauconnier &Turner, 1996), this study analyzed six ASL interpretations and found two new mental spaces, Narrator Space and Interpreter Space, which are activated during interpretations. Conceptual blending has been used analyzing ASL (Liddell, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003; Dudis, 2004a, 2004b, 2007) but had not been applied to ASL interpretations until this study. The conceptual blending process of ASL has found several mental spaces that are activated in blends. Real Space (Liddell, 1995) and Event Space (Dudis, 2007) are two mental spaces that blend in ASL; these two spaces were also found in the data of this study. The data also revealed that all six interpreters created Event Space much like Deaf signers. / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of English