The creative segment of this thesis is a translation of ten short stories taken from the Canadian author Carol Shields' collection: Various Miracles. Using translation principles prescribed by Berman, Riffaterre, Lefevere and Meschonnic, and taking into account Bakhtin's principle of polyphony in the novel as described in "Discourse in the Novel", we have tried to produce a faithful translation, respectful of the profoundly alien nature of this work written in a foreign language (a characteristic that is not to be erased), and true to its polyphonic nature. / In the theoretical section of this thesis we have analyzed the importance of the multiple voices in the collection, an importance that has been stressed by the author herself, as well as by numerous critics. This multiplicity of voices is examined in the light of Bakhtin's concept of polyphony in order to determine if it can be useful to the critic and the translator. We therefore analyze the various voices and types of discourse that are to be found in the collection, in order to show their complexity as well as to permit a better understanding of some of the translation choices that were made.

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The metrics used to compare the performance of various ray tracers in the literature are flawed because they are non-standard and depend on the hardware configuration of the specific system used to gather data. A different way of measuring the relative performance of ray tracing algorithms is proposed and tested across several hardware platforms using correlation co-efficient. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science) North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2011

The metrics used to compare the performance of various ray tracers in the literature are flawed because they are non-standard and depend on the hardware configuration of the specific system used to gather data. A different way of measuring the relative performance of ray tracing algorithms is proposed and tested across several hardware platforms using correlation co-efficient. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science) North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2011

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In speaker verification, the mismatches between the training speech and the testing speech can greatly affect the robustness of classification algorithms, and the mismatches are mainly caused by the changes in the noise types and the signal to noise ratios. This thesis aims at finding the most robust classification methods under multi-noise and multiple signal to noise ratio conditions. Comparison of several well-known state of the art classification algorithms and features in speaker verification are made through examining the performance of small-set speaker verification system (e.g. voice lock for a family). The effect of the testing speech length is also examined. The i-vector/Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis method with compensation strategies is shown to provide a stable performance for both previously seen and previously unseen noise scenarios, and a C++ implementation with online processing and multi-threading is developed for this approach.

No abstract is provided. / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)