A web application known as the Virtual Volunteer has been developed by IBM, the International Federation Red Cross and the Red Crescent Movement. The aim of this application is to extend support to migrants beyond the physical help they receive. The application is also a resource for volunteers who want to help migrants. This paper explores how a culture-centered design approach can help to improve a user interface and enhance the usability for a global audience using Virtual Volunteer as a design case. By conducting multiple interviews and task completion tests with verbal protocols, the results present two independent redesigned prototypes.  The culture-centered design approach yielded valuable feedback and data from the migrants that would not have been possible to collect from a more traditional approach like the one employed when creating the Virtual Volunteer in the first place. The results also revealed that all functions in the application were not clearly understandable for the migrants as they were for the Swedish volunteers. The overall results of the design case shows that a culture-centered design approach together with common usability methods are efficient to use when developing user interfaces for migrants and volunteers. / IBM, Röda Korset och Röda Halvmånen, har tillsammans utvecklat en webbapplikation, Virtual Volunteer, till stöd för migranter som kommer till Sverige. Syftet med applikationen är att utöka stöd till migranter utöver den fysiska hjälp de får. Ett annat syfte är också att applikationen ska fungera som ett hjälpmedel för volontärer som vill hjälpa migranter. I den här studien undersöks hur en kulturcentrerad designmetod kan bidra till att förbättra användargränssnittet och användbarheten för en global publik genom att använda Virtual Volunteer som en designutmaning. Vi skapade två olika prototyper baserat på intervjuer och användartester med migranter och svenska volontärer. Den kulturcentrerade designmetoden gav mycket värdefull feedback och data från migranter jämfört med ett traditionellt tillvägagångssätt som i första hand användes vid skapandet av Virtual Volunteer. Resultaten av designarbetet och användarstudierna visar att designmetoder som tar hänsyn till kultur kan vara en effektiv metod för att utveckla gränssnitt som riktar sig till migranter såväl som svenska volontärer.

<p>The implied reader of a novel is the person that the author writes for. In the case of Åsa Larsson’s Swedish detective novel Solstorm, the implied reader is familiar with Swedish politics, history, and geography but also with biblical references and Swedish customs. When the novel is translated into English, The Savage Altar: Innocence will be Sacrificed, there is a new implied reader, the translator’s implied reader. When culture-specific material is either omitted or misunderstood, or a cultural filter changes the material to suit the new target audience, the context of the novel is also changed. The result is a loss of context.</p>

The implied reader of a novel is the person that the author writes for. In the case of Åsa Larsson’s Swedish detective novel Solstorm, the implied reader is familiar with Swedish politics, history, and geography but also with biblical references and Swedish customs. When the novel is translated into English, The Savage Altar: Innocence will be Sacrificed, there is a new implied reader, the translator’s implied reader. When culture-specific material is either omitted or misunderstood, or a cultural filter changes the material to suit the new target audience, the context of the novel is also changed. The result is a loss of context.

<p>A close reading of a series of books by Eoin Colfer that enjoyed universal success showed a change in the language between the books especially with respect to minor linguistic features such as choice of location and abstract vs. concrete language. The books are about the boy Artemis Fowl, and were presumably conceived as children’s books.</p><p>My original thesis was that the writer could not be sure of the success of the first book, but would definitely be aware of a worldwide audience for at least his third book, due to, for example, questions raised by the translators. If the original audience was expected to be Irish, or British, with very much the same cultural background as the author’s, the imagined subsequent audiences would change with success. My hope was to be able to show this by comparing linguistic features. And indeed, even though some changes could be due to coincidence there was a specific pattern evolving in the series, in that the originally Irish cultural background became less exclusive and more universal. The writer also used more details concerning locations, with added words to specify a place. What could thus be expected in the translated versions would be omissions and additions in especially the first book, but less need for that in later books. This, however, could not be proven in the Swedish translations. I thus conclude that the books became easier to follow for a wider, in this case Swedish, audience mostly because of efforts by the author and less because of the translator.</p>

A close reading of a series of books by Eoin Colfer that enjoyed universal success showed a change in the language between the books especially with respect to minor linguistic features such as choice of location and abstract vs. concrete language. The books are about the boy Artemis Fowl, and were presumably conceived as children’s books. My original thesis was that the writer could not be sure of the success of the first book, but would definitely be aware of a worldwide audience for at least his third book, due to, for example, questions raised by the translators. If the original audience was expected to be Irish, or British, with very much the same cultural background as the author’s, the imagined subsequent audiences would change with success. My hope was to be able to show this by comparing linguistic features. And indeed, even though some changes could be due to coincidence there was a specific pattern evolving in the series, in that the originally Irish cultural background became less exclusive and more universal. The writer also used more details concerning locations, with added words to specify a place. What could thus be expected in the translated versions would be omissions and additions in especially the first book, but less need for that in later books. This, however, could not be proven in the Swedish translations. I thus conclude that the books became easier to follow for a wider, in this case Swedish, audience mostly because of efforts by the author and less because of the translator.

While it certainly can be argued that translation is a quite demanding discipline in general, some areas within this field are, naturally, more challenging than others. One of these is hedging, which serves a broad variety of purposes both with regard to the author and to the intended readership, and hence must be translated accordingly. This paper investigates hedges in scientific research articles, the types and frequency of hedges in the analysed Swedish sourcetext (ST) compared to the English target text (TT), and the methods used for translating these hedges and their distribution by means of a short study conducted on two Swedish runology articles. The study’s quantitative analysis shows that the Swedish ST has a clear preference for adverbial hedges, and to an extent, also for modal verb hedges, whereas the English TT – while yielding an even higher preference for adverbials and also for lexical verbs – uses modal verbs much less frequently. It becomes evident that adverbials may feature so strongly in translations because they are easier to recall and to use than more complex structures, especially for L2 speakers. This practice does, however, result in a somewhat less flexible translation. The by far most frequently used translation strategy is faithful translation, particularly for content-oriented hedges. However, a fair number of adaptations (both in modal strength and word class change) and omissions – mostly of modal verbs – as well as numerous additions occurred, initiated by influential factors such as cultural differences regarding natural sounding text, L2 speaker perception of equivalence and/or lack of suitable linguistic equivalents. Thereby, the English translation showed a tendency toward adapting weaker modals compared to their Swedish ST equivalents, confirming the greater reader-orientation of English research articles.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:06:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5489.pdf: 2144785 bytes, checksum: 5c239d11261b4817f357b24eb40ff8d5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-06-07 / Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / We are currently in the third wave of research in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) area, whose focus is on the context of applications. Technology has been spreading from the workplace to our homes; it becomes part of our everyday lives. Thinking about it, one way of trying to provide this contextualization can be done through culture insertion in applications. However, culture is a very broad concept that encompasses different factors, among them, the common sense, which is a subset of culture consisting of the knowledge we gain in our day-to-day routine activities. Within this context, this work aims to create a new strategy to culturally contextualize an application. Thinking about that, it was created a new module called Cultural Filter that, through the use of a given knowledgebase, filters the stored information to create small cultural contextualized slices according to the profile of the users who will use this application. In this case, information such as age, gender, education level, and geographic location are used in the process of creating these cultural slices. In order to observe the viability of this strategy, an instance of the cultural filter was instantiated using the cultural knowledgebase of project Open Mind Common Sense in Brazil (OMCS-Br). In this case, the filter acts creating cultural slices from the project complete knowledgebase. In the background, this also aims to further the collection of data for this database in question, collecting data generated from the use of these contextualized software. To make this set of cultural filter and knowledge collector accessible to developers and users in general, it was developed an online system that allows any interested person to use the knowledgebase of the project OMCSBr in its applications or, still, just do culturally contextualized searches in the base. We intend to expand access to the Brazilian cultural knowledgebase and make the collection and use of the OMCS-Br knowledgebase operations more flexible, facilitating the development of applications using such a database and, with the filter being part of the OMCS-Br architecture, applications become lighter, closer to the RIA (Rich Internet Application) concept. To achieve the proposed objectives, the OMCS-Br architecture was restructured and expanded. Two new modules have been developed in order to connect with the project API (Application Programming Interface), namely: (i) the Cultural Filter, responsible for performing the filtering in order to retrieve contextual data from the knowledgebase according to the predefined profile and (ii) the Knowledge Collector, responsible for entering collected data through the use of culturally contextualized software into the OMCS-Br project knowledgebase. As a proof of concept, the filter was used in some already existing applications from LIA and, therefore, it was possible to observe the appropriateness of its operation. / Atualmente, estamos na terceira onda das pesquisas na area de Interacao Humano Computador (IHC), cujo foco, encontra-se na contextualizacao das aplicacoes. A tecnologia se espalha a partir do local de trabalho para nossas casas, ela passa a fazer parte de nossas vidas cotidianas. Pensando nisso, uma das maneiras de se tentar prover essa contextualizacao se da atraves da insercao de cultura nas aplicacoes. Porem, cultura e um conceito muito amplo que abrange diferentes fatores, dentre eles, o senso comum, que e um subconjunto da cultura composto pelo conhecimento que adquirimos no nosso dia-a-dia. Dentro desse contexto, este trabalho tem como objetivo criar uma nova estrategia de se contextualizar culturalmente uma aplicacao. Para isso, foi modelado um modulo denominado Filtro Cultural que, atraves do uso de uma dada base de conhecimento, filtra as informacoes armazenadas a fim de criar recortes culturais contextualizados de acordo com o perfil dos usuarios que irao utilizar a aplicacao. Neste caso, informacoes como idade, genero, nivel de escolaridade e localizacao geografica sao utilizadas no processo de criacao desses recortes culturais. Com o intuito de observar a viabilidade dessa estrategia, uma instancia do filtro cultural foi implementada utilizando a base de conhecimento cultural do Projeto Open Mind Common Sense no Brasil (OMCS-Br). Neste caso, o filtro atua criando recortes culturais a partir da base completa do projeto. Em segundo plano, almeja-se tambem ampliar a forma de coleta de dados para essa base em questao, coletando os dados gerados a partir do uso desses software contextualizados. Para disponibilizar esse conjunto de filtro e coletor de conhecimento cultural contextualizado aos desenvolvedores e usuarios em geral, foi desenvolvido um sistema online que permite ao interessado utilizar a base de conhecimento do projeto OMCS-Br em aplicacoes ou, entao, apenas realizar consultas culturalmente contextualizadas na base. Com isso, pretendemos ampliar o acesso a base de conhecimento cultural brasileiro e flexibilizar as operacoes de coleta e uso da base de conhecimento do OMCS-Br, facilitando o desenvolvimento de aplicacoes que utilizem tal base e, com o filtro sendo parte da arquitetura do OMCS-Br, as aplicacoes se tornam mais leves, aproximando-se do conceito de RIA (Rich Internet Application). Para alcancar os objetivos propostos, a arquitetura do projeto OMCS-Br foi reestruturada e ampliada. Dois novos modulos foram elaborados, de forma a se conectarem com a API (Interface de Programacao de Aplicativo) do projeto, sendo eles: (i) o Filtro Cultural, responsavel por realizar a filtragem de modo a resgatar dados contextualizados da base de conhecimento de acordo com os dados do perfil definido e (ii) o Coletor de Conhecimento, responsavel por inserir na base de conhecimento do projeto OMCS-Br os dados coletados atraves do uso de softwares culturalmente contextualizados. Como prova de conceito, o filtro foi usado em algumas aplicacoes ja existentes no LIA e, com isso, foi possivel observar a adequacao de seu funcionamento.