The thesis deals with the way student groups translate when simulating interactions between translators and clients, using risk management concepts as tools for describing their decisions. The research aims are: 1) to explore how the use of peer-group interaction in a simulated setting affects students’ ways of managing risk while translating, and 2) to study whether translators have any identifiable pattern of behavior of risk management and effort distribution. A two-cycle experiment involving two roles, the translator and the simulated client, was carried out with a class of translation students to test the effects of the main variable of peer-group interaction. Performance data were collected with screen recordings and think-aloud protocols. Additional data are collected through pre-and-post-experiment questionnaires and interviews with student subjects. The research analyzes of the translators’ rendition processes, codes the problems they face, observe the translation procedures they consider and finally adopt, and looks into the justifications for their procedures, in order to interpret their risk management. / La presente investigación analiza cómo los estudiantes de traducción gestionan el riesgo mientras traducen en un entorno simulado en el que se representa la relación traductor-cliente. Los objetivos de la investigación son: 1) analizar cómo la interacción de grupo de pares en un entorno simulado altera la forma en que los estudiantes gestionan el riesgo durante la traducción, y 2) averiguar si los traductores individuales tienen un patrón de comportamiento identificable en lo que respecta a la gestión de riesgo y a la distribución del esfuerzo. Se realizó un experimento de dos ciclos que incluyó dos roles (el traductor y el cliente simulado) con un grupo de estudiantes de traducción para evaluar los efectos de la interacción en un grupo de pares. Se recolectaron datos adicionales por medio de cuestionarios previos y posteriores al experimento, así como también por medio de entrevistas con los sujetos. Con el fin de interpretar su gestión del riesgo, la investigación analiza los procesos de traducción de los traductores, clasifica los problemas que enfrentaron, considera los procedimientos de traducción que tuvieron en cuenta y los que, finalmente, decidieron usar, y busca la razón por la que usaron dichos procedimientos.

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Published Article / This article argues that, whether she recognises it or not, the translator is an agent, i.e. someone with an active hand in the intercultural communication process. This position endows the translator with the responsibility to make decisions in intercultural communication that can have far-reaching ideological effects. For this reason, translators should be educated to be able to take up this responsibility. In this regard, the author proposes the notion of wisdom as the aim of translator education. The article also argues in favour of indigenising and even subverting translations in theAfrican context.

Published Article / This article questions current philosophies and practices in translator training in South Africa against the background of the international debate on translator training. It puts up for discussion the notion of a competent translator as the basis for departure in a discussion on translator training. The context within which translator training takes place is discussed, with specific reference to the South African context. The choice for a particular theory of teaching and learning, as well as assessment in translator training receives attention. The article puts forward various research questions that should be addressed in order to enhance translator training.

Metaphors have long shaped the way pure translation studies describe and justify the translation phenomenon by discovering and consolidating underlying principles. Ultimately, by means of metaphor, something that dwells on the interaction of two seemingly distinct things, translation theorists have obtained a better understanding of the category of translation. Human beings are gregarious, and disputes are inevitable in every society, ancient or modern, primitive or civilized. In fact, conflict is one iron law of life that mankind has had to improvise ways of resolving, from such formal ones as litigation to private ones such as self-help. We may not be able to eliminate dispute altogether, but we can, however, resolve it through creative and civilized means. Translation can be approached in a similar context, except it concerns a metaphorical dispute between cultures and/or languages—and probably on a more intangible and subtle platform. Disparate cultures, religions and languages in a clash can be brought closer to each other with skillful translation, and hence, translation is a variation of dispute resolution. That never went totally unnoticed. Over the years, countless translation metaphors have been constructed and exploited with very different results, which indicates how interdisciplinary a subject translation studies really is. Yet, apparently, translation is most often metaphorized as mediation and negotiation but rarely as arbitration or litigation, and one cannot but wonder whether this happened out of sheer coincidence or because of some misunderstanding. Thus, much as I appreciate what theorists have accomplished with translation metaphors, in regard to didactics and heuristics, my primitive observation is that translation theorists and practitioners have never made full use of metaphorization in that they might have had an incomplete idea of dispute resolution theory in general. After all, a metaphor is, ideally, meant to facilitate active learning and full integration of new knowledge, but there still remains a missing piece that is part and parcel of our metaphorization of translation. Specifically, translators have always embraced the amicable terms of negotiation and mediation, distancing themselves from non-mainstream ones such as arbitration and litigation. To that end, in my thesis, I will explore and examine translation through slightly renewed lenses, demonstrating how and why our metaphor schema and mapping should originate in dispute resolution, and why litigation, and perhaps even arbitration as dispute resolution mechanisms, would serve as good a metaphor—if not a better one—for translation. It is my resolute belief that the translator is more qualified as a judge, a respectable professional vested with immense judicial power, than as a mediator, who is but a third-party neutral facilitating dialogue between two disputants. Only in this way can metaphors do translation theory a great service by furnishing it with a renewed and objective description of translation.

Many companies in the domain of modeling and simulation are showing interest in the new emerging OpenModelica, an object oriented modeling and simulation platform based on Modelica language. The purpose of this thesis is to study if and how simulation libraries written in ExtendSim such as PaperFront, can be semi-automatically converted to equivalent Modelica libraries. The ExtendSim tool is based upon a C like language called ModL that is used for designing models. A prototype translator is developed for translating ModL to Modelica. One difficulty that had to be overcome was the fact that ExtendSim is a commercial tool which hides part of its model information in a binary format. The generated code from prototype translator can be viewed using any text editor or using the textual view of Modelica graphical editors such as OMEdit or Dymola. The implementation of the prototype translator is done using the Java based ANTLR tool, which generates a parser and a lexer from the defined grammar rules. Moreover, a set of templates is written using the StringTemplate language for the code generation. The prototype translator takes ModL code of an ExtendSim library file and generates an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), which is then converted to an equivalent Modelica AST. This Modelica AST is later converted to textual Modelica code. Subject to limited resource availability and time constraints of the thesis work, the basic constructs of ModL language are supported by the translator e.g. data types, if-else statements, loops, procedures etc. The enhancements in the translator can be made in the future by adding support for remaining language features such as support for tracing and additional ModL built-in functions etc.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / Social media affects our daily lives. It is one of the first sources for finding breaking news. In particular, Twitter is one of the popular social media platforms, with around 330 million monthly users. From local events such as Fake Patty's Day to across the world happenings - Twitter gets there first. During a disaster, tweets can be used to post warnings, status of available medical and food supply, emergency personnel, and updates. Users were practically tweeting about the Hurricane Sandy, despite lack of network during the storm. Analysis of these tweets can help monitor the disaster, plan and manage the crisis, and aid in research. In this research, we use the publicly available tweets posted during several disasters and identify the relevant tweets. As the languages in the datasets are different, Bing translation API has been used to detect and translate the tweets. The translations are then, used as training datasets for supervised machine learning algorithms. Supervised learning is the process of learning from a labeled training dataset. This learned classifier can then be used to predict the correct output for any valid input. When trained to more observations, the algorithm improves its predictive performance.

Metaphors have long shaped the way pure translation studies describe and justify the translation phenomenon by discovering and consolidating underlying principles. Ultimately, by means of metaphor, something that dwells on the interaction of two seemingly distinct things, translation theorists have obtained a better understanding of the category of translation. Human beings are gregarious, and disputes are inevitable in every society, ancient or modern, primitive or civilized. In fact, conflict is one iron law of life that mankind has had to improvise ways of resolving, from such formal ones as litigation to private ones such as self-help. We may not be able to eliminate dispute altogether, but we can, however, resolve it through creative and civilized means. Translation can be approached in a similar context, except it concerns a metaphorical dispute between cultures and/or languages—and probably on a more intangible and subtle platform. Disparate cultures, religions and languages in a clash can be brought closer to each other with skillful translation, and hence, translation is a variation of dispute resolution. That never went totally unnoticed. Over the years, countless translation metaphors have been constructed and exploited with very different results, which indicates how interdisciplinary a subject translation studies really is. Yet, apparently, translation is most often metaphorized as mediation and negotiation but rarely as arbitration or litigation, and one cannot but wonder whether this happened out of sheer coincidence or because of some misunderstanding. Thus, much as I appreciate what theorists have accomplished with translation metaphors, in regard to didactics and heuristics, my primitive observation is that translation theorists and practitioners have never made full use of metaphorization in that they might have had an incomplete idea of dispute resolution theory in general. After all, a metaphor is, ideally, meant to facilitate active learning and full integration of new knowledge, but there still remains a missing piece that is part and parcel of our metaphorization of translation. Specifically, translators have always embraced the amicable terms of negotiation and mediation, distancing themselves from non-mainstream ones such as arbitration and litigation. To that end, in my thesis, I will explore and examine translation through slightly renewed lenses, demonstrating how and why our metaphor schema and mapping should originate in dispute resolution, and why litigation, and perhaps even arbitration as dispute resolution mechanisms, would serve as good a metaphor—if not a better one—for translation. It is my resolute belief that the translator is more qualified as a judge, a respectable professional vested with immense judicial power, than as a mediator, who is but a third-party neutral facilitating dialogue between two disputants. Only in this way can metaphors do translation theory a great service by furnishing it with a renewed and objective description of translation.

Review of Deborah Uman. Women as Translators in Early Modern England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. 166 pages. $65.00.

The purpose of the project was to develop a product that would serve as a support for the learning of Braille. Learning Braille is a time consuming process. People who have recently suffered a visual impairment have a lower sensitivity to touch than those who have been visually impaired for a longer period. According to a study [1], the learning process can lead to depression. At the same time, the technology for support systems for the visually impaired is underdeveloped. The questions examined in the project were partly about the environment’s influence on the accuracy of the instrument’s translation of Braille. Partly, if it was possible to create an instrument that can translate Braille in standard format and at the same time be a suitable aid for a user with a visual impairment. The instrument consisted of four main parts; reading surface, reading head, audio output and keyboard. The purpose of the reading surface was to place the Braille to be translated under the reading head using a stepper motor. The reading head would then interpret the letter, which would then be called out as an audio file using the audio output. All operations of the instrument would be controlled by a keyboard with three push buttons. The resulting product was promising. The analysis showed that it was fully possible to create a functioning Braille translator. However the product requires some further development in order to be used as an effective aid / Syftet med projektet var att ta fram en produkt som skulle fungera som ett stöd för inlärning av punktskrift. Personer som nyligen drabbats av en synskada har sämre känslighet för beröring än de som varit synskadade under en längre period. Enligt en studie [1] kan tidskrävande inlärningsprocessen leda till depression, samtidigt som tekniken för stödsystem åt synskadade är underutvecklad. De frågeställningar som undersöktes i projektet handlade dels om omgivningens påverkan av exaktheten av instrumentets översättning. Dels om det var möjligt att skapa ett instrument som kan översätta punktskrift i standardformat och samtidigt vara ett passande hjälpmedel för en användare med en synskada. Instrumentet bestod av fyra huvudsakliga delar; avläsningsyta, avläsningshuvud, ljudutgång samt tangentbord. Avläsningsytans syfte var att placera punktskriften som skulle översättas under anläsningshuvudet med hjälp av en stegmotor. Avläsningshuvudet skulle därefter tolka bokstaven som sedan skulle utropas som en ljudfil med hjälp av ljudutgången. Instrumentets samtliga operationer skulle styras av ett tangentbord med tre tryckknappar. Resultatet av den framtagna produkten var lovande. Undersökningarna påvisade att det var fullt möjligt att skapa en fungerande översättare. Dock krävs det en vidareutveckling för att produkten skall kunna användas som etteffektivt hjälpmedel.