Thesis (M.A. (Translation and Linguistics)) -- University of Limpopo, 2008 / Refer to the document

Research-informed practice is crucial to ensure best possible decisions are made during care delivery. In reality, research-based evidence often does not reach patient care due to many elements that impede the implementation process. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to discover the lived experiences of nurses involved in implementing evidence-based practice (EBP) in clinical settings within hospitals in United Arab Emirates. The theoretical and conceptual basis for the study was derived from Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services framework for knowledge translation and Benner's Novice to Expert theory. Twelve nurses who had experience implementing evidence to practice were the participants of this study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Three themes emerged from the study that included the significance of EBP, the process of evidence translation, and the outcome of evidence translation. Nurses in the clinical settings had basic understanding of EBP and were motivated to translate evidence, but their knowledge and skill in EBP were still limited. The implication for positive social change of this study is the recommendation that leaders in healthcare and nursing, as well as educators, and researchers to recognize the need for building EBP capabilities among nurses. Organizations must include current theories, frameworks, and tools of evidence translation to cultivate a culture of EBP as a foundation for patient care.

This thesis aims to analyse several translations of J.D. Salinger's short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish: namely two translations and two edited versions of the latter one. The contrastive view is used to discern the main differences in meaning of the original and the translated texts. There are several points of view adopted to recognise the differences. On the syntactic level, the contrast between the texts was found to be present in the treatment of the author's style, predominantly in the narrative perspective. Not employing nominal structures a great deal, the author's style was not lost in the translation process. Comparing the translated texts, a tendency to adhere to the syntactic surface structure of the original text was found in the less recent versions. Another level of analysis explored the temporal relations of the texts, with the original text relying mostly on structures expressing sequences of events and also simultaneity of events, but not the perfective aspect to a great degree. These time relations are also found to be communicated in the translated texts successfully. It is not only the narrator that is discussed in this thesis, as a great portion of the short story consist of dialogues. The analysis aimed, using certain excerpts of the story, to find to what degree...

Thesis (M.A. (African languages) --University of Limpopo, 2010 / The study examines a variety of problems that are associated with the translation of the Maintenance Act of South Africa (1998) from English into Tshivenḓa. The study also analyses various translation methods and procedures, and attempts to apply them in the translation of the aforementioned Act. Currently, there seems to be a great lack of legal terminology in Tshivenḓa. As a result, officials end up using English when they interact with their clients who are largely illiterate. Therefore, the study focuses on translation strategies that can be invoked in order to solve the problem of lack of terminology in indigenous languages in general and Tshivenḓa in particular. Chapter two gives a review of the literature and theories pertaining to various translation topics such as, definition of translation, types of translation, methods of translation and procedure of translation. Chapter three addresses issues pertaining to the strategies of translation, methods of translation and terminology development or term formation processes in African languages. These aspects are used by the researcher to expand on the aims and objectives of this research study. Chapter four analyses the respondents’ responses with regard to the translation of legal terminology used in the Maintenance Act (no: 99 of 1998) from English into Tshivenḓa language. A questionnaire was used to examine whether respondents would correctly translate legal terminology from English into Tshivenḓa language. Their responses are also discussed here. Chapter five gives a conclusion to this study.

Este trabajo se centra en la traducción al español del poema de Andrew Kaufman “Signs of the Cross”, que se encuentra en su libro Earth’s Ends. El poema presenta una visión familiar, al mismo tiempo que extranjerizante, de los pueblos latinoamericanos a los que describe. Se tratan en él temas como el cambio constante, la desacralización de lo sagrado, la reescritura de la historia, la resiliencia de algunos de los pueblos latinoamericanos, el peso del pasado sobre ellos, así como la presencia del cristianismo y los símbolos de la cruz presentes en acontecimientos históricos importantes, la religión, la vida cotidiana y la naturaleza. Junto con la traducción del poema, se proporciona un análisis detallado de las nueve partes que lo componen, así como comentarios sobre las principales dificultades de traducción. Se emprendió la tarea de traducir como un ejercicio de back-translation figurativo, mediante el cual se devolvió el poema al idioma de la cultura que lo inspiró: el español, idioma que además ayuda a completar el significado del texto.

<p>The aim of this study was to identify the strategies used to render the literary dialect in A State of Independence into the Swedish translation. In order to systematically study the translation solutions, a number of ‘coupled pairs’ consisting of source text ‘problems’ and target text ‘solutions’ were extracted from the original text and the translation. The ‘coupled pairs’ were then analysed in order to detect regularities in the translation solutions. The study showed that the major strategy used by the translator was the use of ‘eye-dialect’, i.e. non-standard spellings that simulate non-standard speech. Moreover, some passages in the translation had been standardised, whereas eye-dialectal spellings were found in other passages where the original did not contain any non-standard features. Finally, a comparative count of dialectally marked utterances in both texts was made. The count showed that the dialectal markers were in the majority in the translation, which might indicate that the translator has tried to compensate for the lack of equivalent target language features.</p>

<p>The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of translating a book title from English into Swedish and vice versa. I have investigated the different methods used when translating a title, as well how common each strategy is. By contacting publishing companies and translators in Sweden, I learned of the process of adapting a title from the source language into a foreign market and the target language. Studying 156 titles originally published in English, and 47 titles originally written in Swedish, I was able to see some patterns. I was particularly interested in what strategies are most commonly used.</p><p>In my study I found nine different strategies of translating a book title form English into Swedish. I have classified them as follows: Keeping the original title, Translating the title literally, Literal translation with modifications, Keeping part of the original title and adding a literal translation, Adding a Swedish tag to the English title, Adding a Swedish tag to the literal translation, Translation with an omission, Creating a new title loosely related to the original title and finally Creating a completely different title. In the study of titles translated from Swedish into English, I found eight different translation strategies; seven of the strategies were the same as in the translation of titles from English into Swedish. The one method that differed is called Translation with an addition. The study of titles originally published in Swedish was much smaller; and yet more variety and creativity was shown in the translations. The conditions for translating from Swedish into English are different since English readers normally have no knowledge of Swedish. Names of characters and places for example, are very likely to sound very odd to an English reader, and therefore more translations are necessary. Swedish readers on the other hand are generally relatively proficient in English since they are exposed to the language naturally in their everyday lives through for example, television. Therefore it was easier to stay close to the original in the translations from English into Swedish.</p>

<p>The focus of this thesis is on re-using translations in natural language processing. It involves the collection of documents and their translations in an appropriate format, the automatic extraction of translation data, and the application of the extracted data to different tasks in natural language processing.</p><p>Five parallel corpora containing more than 35 million words in 60 languages have been collected within co-operative projects. All corpora are sentence aligned and parts of them have been analyzed automatically and annotated with linguistic markup.</p><p>Lexical data are extracted from the corpora by means of word alignment. Two automatic word alignment systems have been developed, the Uppsala Word Aligner (UWA) and the Clue Aligner. UWA implements an iterative "knowledge-poor" word alignment approach using association measures and alignment heuristics. The Clue Aligner provides an innovative framework for the combination of statistical and linguistic resources in aligning single words and multi-word units. Both aligners have been applied to several corpora. Detailed evaluations of the alignment results have been carried out for three of them using fine-grained evaluation techniques.</p><p>A corpus processing toolbox, Uplug, has been developed. It includes the implementation of UWA and is freely available for research purposes. A new version, Uplug II, includes the Clue Aligner. It can be used via an experimental web interface (UplugWeb).</p><p>Lexical data extracted by the word aligners have been applied to different tasks in computational lexicography and machine translation. The use of word alignment in monolingual lexicography has been investigated in two studies. In a third study, the feasibility of using the extracted data in interactive machine translation has been demonstrated. Finally, extracted lexical data have been used for enhancing the lexical components of two machine translation systems.</p>

One of the main aims of this thesis is to examine the translational situation of popular fiction in post-industrial Japan. Specifically, the goal is to uncover two main aspects surrounding the phenomenon of translationese, the language used in translation. One aspect to be investigated is the characteristic features of Japanese translationese, and the other is readers’ attitudes toward translationese. This research is conducted within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury, 1995). The literature review includes a background of how translationese has been approached previously and how methods from different fields (e.g., corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics) can be used in the research of translation. Through the review of the historical background of Japanese translationese and the development of Japanese writing styles, it is revealed that the translation norm in Japan had been very closely oriented toward the original text. In the text analysis, the corpora consist of translations from English and non-translations (i.e., originally written in Japanese) in the genre of popular fiction. The goal of the text analysis is to determine whether the features of translationese are actually characteristics of translationese. The features selected for this examination include the following: 1) overt personal pronouns; 2) more frequent loanwords; 3) female specific language; 4) abstract nouns as grammatical subjects of transitive verbs; and 5) longer paragraphs. Two features (third person pronouns and longer paragraphs) are shown to be characteristic of translationese, while others were proven otherwise or questionable (loan words, female language, abstract nouns as subjects of transitive verbs). Findings from the investigation of readers’ attitudes can help identify what constitutes the “norms” of translation (Toury, 1995, 1999) in Japanese society. Readers appear to be able to tell the difference between translation and non-translation. However, readers’ attitudes toward both translationese and non-translationese are more or less neutral or slightly positive. This may indicate that Japanese translationese has become integrated into the contemporary Japanese writing system and that readers do not regard translationese as overtly negative. This study shows that the major translation norm is becoming more domesticated translation in popular fiction, with the focus on making translations easier for the readers. / Translation Studies

The genetic code is redundant, with most amino acids coded by multiple codons. In many organisms, codon usage is biased towards particular codons. A variety of adaptive and non-adaptive explanations have been proposed to explain these patterns of codon usage bias. Using mechanistic models of protein translation and population genetics, I explore the relative importance of various evolutionary forces in shaping these patterns. This work challenges one of the fundamental assumptions made in over 30 years of research: codons with higher tRNA abundances leads to lower error rates. I show that observed patterns of codon usage are inconsistent with selection for translation accuracy. I also show that almost all the variation in patterns of codon usage in S. cerevisiae can be explained by a model taking into account the effects of mutational biases and selection for efficient ribosome usage. In addition, by sampling suboptimal mRNA secondary structures at various temperatures, I show that melting of ribosomal binding sites in a special class of mRNAs known as RNA thermometers is a more general phenomenon.