The main topic of this thesis is the translation of the food-related cultural references. The theoretical part is primarily focused on translation techniques and strategies which are usually used for the translation of cultural elements. Furthermore, the other objective of this part is to introduce this topic in the context of the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language. Specifically, it deals with the incorporation of a sociocultural component in the Spanish courses and the translation as a pedagogical tool. The theoretical foundations are put into practice in a translation techniques analysis and there is also a didactic proposal designed for Czech students of Translation and Interpreting.

Oil and Gas companies have the inevitable need to operate in a global environment and therefore have a global reach. This thesis seeks to understand the nature and degree of localisation of the websites in this industry. This thesis introduces two notions of ‘global’, and seeks to examine the relationship between them: the first of which is the Global reach or operations of companies and the second is where a company’s communication is localised in language and cultural terms. A company can be seen to be ‘global’ in one of these two notions and it is this relationship that this thesis seeks to explore. The contribution of this thesis firstly, is that it adds to previous studies of website localisation, which have focused primarily on consumer goods and the retail industry, by examining a different kind of industry. Secondly, it takes into account the important semiotic and symbolic dimensions of language and culture when looking at localisation practices. The thesis thus contributes to the growing literature on website localisation and practices in Multinational companies. This study was carried out on 387 corporate and country specific websites of 16 Oil and Gas Companies to understand the extent and nature of their localisation practises particularly the way that language and culture are presented. The websites were studied using a qualitative and quantitative research design which involved carrying out a linguistic/semiotic analysis and a cultural analysis to give a balanced perspective of localisation practices. The conclusions of the study were that the companies operated a ‘glocal’ strategy, a combination of both a localised and a globalised (standardised) strategy. The companies had a combination of globally standardised features such as the website layouts, images, colour schemes, logos and the use of global celebrities on their websites and a limited degree of localisation where the ‘local’ is signified by local country websites, local news stories, local languages, local celebrities, images of local sights, images of company’s local office buildings and local petrol stations.

Language can sometimes be an impediment in communication. Whether we are talking about people who speak different languages, students who are learning a new language, or people with language disorders, the understanding of linguistic representations in a given language requires a certain amount of knowledge that not everybody has. In this thesis, we propose "translation through pictures" as a means for conveying simple pieces of information across language barriers, and describe a system that can automatically generate pictorial representations for simple sentences. Comparative experiments conducted on visual and linguistic representations of information show that a considerable amount of understanding can be achieved through pictorial descriptions, with results within a comparable range of those obtained with current machine translation techniques. Moreover, a user study conducted around the pictorial translation system reveals that users found the system to generally produce correct word/image associations, and rate the system as interactive and intelligent.

We refactor the traditional two-step approach of automatic speech recognition for spoken language translation. Instead of conventional graphemes, we use phonemes as an intermediate speech representation. Starting with the acoustic model, we revise the cross-lingual transfer and propose a coarse-to-fine method providing further speed-up and performance boost. Further, we review the translation model. We experiment with source and target encoding, boosting the robustness by utilizing the fine-tuning and transfer across ASR and SLT. We empirically document that this conventional setup with an alternative representation not only performs well on standard test sets but also provides robust transcripts and translations on challenging (e.g., non-native) test sets. Notably, our ASR system outperforms commercial ASR systems. 1

Sequence-to-sequence learning led to significant improvements to machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. These advancements were first reflected in spoken language translation (SLT) when using a cascade of (at least) ASR and MT with the new "neural" models, then by using sequence-to-sequence learning to directly translate the input audio speech into text in the target language. In this thesis we cover both approaches to the SLT task. First, we show the limits of NMT in terms of robustness to input errors when compared to the previous phrase-based state of the art. We then focus on the NMT component to achieve better translation quality with higher computational efficiency by using a network based on weakly-recurrent units. Our last work involving a cascade explores the effects on the NMT robustness when adding automatic transcripts to the training data. In order to move to the direct speech-to-text approach, we introduce MuST-C, the largest multilingual SLT corpus for training direct translation systems. MuST-C increases significantly the size of publicly available data for this task as well as their language coverage. With such availability of data, we adapted the Transformer architecture to the SLT task for its computational efficiency . Our adaptation, which we call S-Transformer, is meant to better model the audio input, and with it we set a new state of the art for MuST-C. Building on these positive results, we finally use S-Transformer with different data applications: i) one-to-many multilingual translation by training it on MuST-C; ii participation to the IWSLT 19 shared task with data augmentation; and iii) instance-based adaptation for using the training data at test time. The results in this thesis show a steady quality improvement in direct SLT. Our hope is that the presented resources and technological solutions will increase its adoption in the near future, so to make multilingual information access easier in a globalized world.

My thesis, Literary Citizenship and the Politics of Language: The Galician Literary Field between 1939 and 1965, is the first attempt to examine the building process of Galician national literature by focusing on one of its constitutive elements, the linguistic criterion. Drawing on Mario Santana's concept of literary citizenship, which can be defined as membership of a literary community, it pays attention to the development of the idea that Galician literary citizenship is language specific, in other words, that to be a member of the national literature, writers have to write in Galician. It does so by focusing on one of the most neglected periods in Galician and Spanish Studies (1939–1965). Chapter one, 'Going Public: The Adventure of Galician Publishing, 1939–1965', presents the first ever account of the publishing world in the studied period. Chapter two, 'From Region to Nation: Galician Literary Studies', argues that the main battleground in the definition of Galician literary citizenship was the field of Galician literary studies, where the concept of literary citizenship was naturalised and then institutionalised. Chapter three, 'Negotiating Identities', explores writers' language choices, paying special attention to those who wished to earn a language-specific Galician literary citizenship. Apart from native and exophonic writers, the chapter addresses writers who did so through translation. Chapter four, 'No Man's Land: Female Writing and Language', argues that female writers had a double-edged experience in the literary field. The patriarchal literary institutions were interested in their symbolic capital but they exercised firm control over them. The conclusion, 'A New raison d'être for Galician Literary Studies', summarises the main argument put forward by this thesis, that to understand fully the development of Galician literary citizenship, literature must be studied outside the national framework.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Translation Studies and Linguistics)) --University of Limpopo, 2017 / This study examines the translation of idioms and fixed expressions between Tshivenḓa and English. The aim of the study is to explore factors that lead to the mistranslation of idioms and fixed expressions between the two languages. The study presents problems that are encountered in the translation of the idioms and fixed expressions between these languages and looks at translation strategies that can be used. In translating idioms, the translator encounters various difficulties that are not usually easy to overcome mainly due to lack of equivalence. It is rare to come across an idiom in the source language that shares the same form and meaning in the target language. In order to deal with the problems that arise in the process of translation, translators use various strategies. Among others, the translator must have extensive knowledge about the function of idioms in the source and target languages. From the data collected, the study revealed that there are numerous problems that the translator comes across in the process of translation. These include the ambiguity of idioms; idioms expressing meaning at a literal level; idioms that do not exist in the target language and the frequency of use of an idiom. The study adopted the qualitative research approach to collect and analyse data. Through use of this approach, it was noted that the translator needs to take into account cultures associated with the languages involved as well as the context in the translation process. The translation of idioms cannot be properly done without considering the impact of culture. A translator must be well-versed in the culture of both the source and target languages. It is important for one to know that language and culture are two entities that are inseparable. Idioms and fixed expressions express the uniqueness of the language and culture of the respective languages. Therefore, translators must have a comprehensive knowledge base of both languages and cultural context. From the recommendations made in this study, the following are the most prominent ones: Linguists should be exposed to idiomatic expressions in order to enhance their knowledge of the translation of idioms and fixed expressions. There are instances where idioms are translated literally because the translator does not understand or recognise the idiom. Therefore, this study recommends that translators need to learn more about idioms in order to have better understanding of translation of idioms and fixed expressions. Translators need to learn more about the translation strategies that are available to deal with the translation of idioms and fixed expressions. The first strategy is translation by using an idiom of similar meaning and form. This strategy involves using an idiom in the target language consisting of equivalent lexical items, which conveys roughly the same meaning as that of the source-language idiom. The second strategy is translation by idioms of similar meaning but dissimilar form. This strategy uses an idiom in the target language which has a meaning similar to that of the source idiom or expression, but consists of different lexical items. The third strategy is translation by paraphrasing. In this strategy, the translator transfers the meaning of an idiom using a single word or a group of words which roughly correspond to the meaning of the idiom but is not an idiom itself. The fourth strategy is translation by omission. This is used to completely omit the idiom from the target text where there is no close match between the items of the two languages. Where the idiom is very difficult for the translator, one tries to eliminate the whole part of the idiom. The fifth strategy is translation by a superordinate. This strategy is used to solve the problem of non-equivalence across languages because the hierarchical structure of semantic fields is not language specific. This strategy involves translation by a more neutral and less expressive word. Lastly, it is translation by cultural substitution which is a method that requires the replacement of a culture-specific item or expression with a target language one that has no exact meaning, but has an impact on the target reader. However, this study recommends translation by idioms of similar meaning with a dissimilar form. The researcher believes that this strategy provides the closest meaning of the idiom in the target language. Idioms might not be the same in form but the meaning can be derived from the idiom with a dissimilar form.

Die „Wege zum Neutschechischen“, die Tat’ána Vykypělová nachverfolgt, haben ebenso innersprachliche wie äußere – gesellschaftliche, politische und im „langen 16. Jahrhundert“ (S. 57) vor allem konfessionelle – Ursachen. Vf. strebt in ihren kenntnisreichen und sprachgeschichtlich weitsichtigen „Studien zur Geschichte der tschechischen Schriftsprache“ deshalb eine neue „synthetische“ Darstellung der Sprachgeschichte an, die äußere und innere Faktoren aufeinander bezieht (S. 19f.). Im Mittelpunkt steht die konfessionelle Markierung sprachlicher Merkmale, deren Standardisierung oder deren Verlust mit eben dieser Markierung in Verbindung zu bringen sei.

This thesis is focused on the research of the functions of surzhyk in contemporary Ukrainian literature and is a continuation of the dissertation Literary surzhyk: contours of literary multilingualism written by Alexej Sevruk. The extension lies in a more detailed focus on the analysis of chosen novels and on the determining the functions of surzhyk in those novels. The theoretical part of the thesis will focus on the definition of surzhyk, its genesis and use in literature. Particular attention will be paid to how the use and conception of surzhyk has changed in recent years. The goal of this thesis is to define the function of surzhyk in the selected novels written by the contemporary Ukrainian writers, such as Artem Chapay, Lyubko Deresh, Lyuba Klymenko, Artem Czech, Oleksiy Chupa along with others. The chosen writers represent different generations and come from different parts of Ukraine, which will allow us to analyze surzhyk in different types of texts and thus expand the typology of its use. The main aim of this thesis is to analyze novel fragments in which surzhyk occurs and to suggest our own translation of selected fragments. Key words: contemporary Ukrainian literature, surzhyk, Ukrainian-Russian mixed language, translation of surzhyk

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo traduzir e analisar o Liber Primus da obra Inscriptionum Libri Duo, do poeta neolatino francês Jean Visagier. Esse livro foi publicado em 1538, em Paris, na tipografia de Simon de Colines. O Liber Primus dessa obra possui noventa e três epigramas que foram traduzidos e, posteriormente, estudados quanto à imitação que fazem da antiguidade clássica. Encontramos vestígios, nesses epigramas, de autores latinos como Catulo, Marcial e Ovídio. Sendo um poeta renascentista, em alguns momentos foi necessário cotejar seu texto com a tradição posterior à clássica, sobretudo nos epigramas de cunho erótico. Inclui-se, ainda, um estudo introdutório sobre a inserção de Jean Visagier na cultura do século XVI, principalmente entre o grupo de poetas neolatinos. / The purpose of this research is to translate and to analyze the Liber Primus of the book Inscriptionum Libri Duo, by the French Neo-Latin poet Jean Visagier. This book was published in 1538, in Paris, in the typography of Simon de Colines. The Liber Primus has ninety-three epigrams that were translated and later studied regarding their imitation of Classical Antiquity. We found vestiges, in these epigrams, of Latin authors like Catulus, Martial and Ovid. As Visagier is a Renaissance poet, at times, it was necessary to compare his text with the post-Classical tradition, especially in the erotic epigrams. It also includes an introductory study on the insertion of Jean Visagier in the culture of the sixteenth century, mainly in the group of Neo-latin poets.