According to Sir Trick...

Monday, February 14, 2011

Legal Translation Overview

Legal Translation

By nature, legal translation is a delicate process that only professional translators commissioned by the court should handle the process. Laws are culturally subjective and require expertise in understanding passages of documents that are legal in nature.

In the international law, legal translation follows the following general rules:

1. Legal system of the source language must suit the culture of the language format and reflective of the legal language

2. The translation should be read by someone who is well-versed with the other legal system where the translation was prepared

3. Proper documentation of the translation is required such as certificate of accuracy, witness statement, court orders, immigration documents, labels and other related documents.

Since legal translation is culture-based, the process is lexis dependent and must be structure base on the linguistics standards which is generally accepted to produce formal and legal equivalence of the target language.

Some examples of legal translations are contracts, international court decisions and proceedings, safety precaution instructions, flight transactions, import/export laws, international transactions, etc.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Lexicography Basic Principles

Lexicographer - a compiler or writer of a dictionary; a student of the lexical component of language, concerned with what words are, what they mean, how the vocabulary of a language is structured, how speakers of the language use and understand the words, how the words evolved, and what relationships exist between words. This is the information a lexicographer compiles when creating a dictionary. So, a lexicographer is a linguist whose specific expertise is in writing dictionaries.A high lexicographic information cost, on the other hand, means that the users of a dictionary find it difficult to access and comprehend the information they were looking for. Specialized lexicographers compile, organize, and edit dictionaries specific to a wide variety of purposes and professions.

Typology - classification according to general type; Computer models are used in biology, chemistry, and physics, as well as economics and psychology. The typology of computer models categorizes them based on a set of four variables. Are they stochastic or deterministic? steady-state or dynamic? continuous or discrete? local or distributed? Computer simulations in the form of 3D models are used in health care, the sciences, architecture, and most popularly, in motion pictures, computer games, and video games. For this reason, both David and Judith were considered antecedents of Christ in the kind of Biblical analysis called typology, where Old Testament events bear some relation to the New Testament’s narrative of salvation.

Grammatical - of or pertaining to grammar,the grammatic structure of a sentence, grammatical rules, grammatical gender. Languages of the Caucasian family often have four genders - feminine, masculine, animate, and inanimate. Again, non-native speakers often find these grammatical distinctions unexpected; heavenly bodies and plants may be considered "animate" in some languages. The speaker may be referring to himself or herself, directly to another person, or about another person. The grammatical person normally affects the form of verb used in a sentence. Many people can better understand what a grammatical person is by referring to the similar concept introduced in literature, which is known as a point of view.

Morpheme - minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units. For example, the letter “s” in the word “dogs” is a bound morpheme because it does not have any semantic meaning without the free morpheme “dog.” In the English language, morphemes may also be classified into the following types: root, stem, or affix. Logograms are sometimes pictograms, visually related to the word or morpheme they represent, and sometimes ideograms, representing more abstract ideas.

Linguist - a specialist in linguistics. Some linguists choose to work in the world of computer and software design, devising speech recognition programs or applying the precepts of linguistics to search engine efficiency. Governments frequently offer linguist jobs either in the diplomatic realms or intelligence services. As of 2009, particularly in the United States, there were many government career possibilities for those fluent in Middle Eastern languages and dialects. There is often some distinction made between linguists themselves, but in the ordinary sense of explanation a linguist is any person who is highly educated in both the practical and theoretical elements of one or more given language. There are both associations and professional organizations where a linguist may affiliate with other specialists who share their interests. One such organization is the Chartered Institute of Linguists, which publishes their own magazine titled The Linguist.

Semantic Change - Due to the fact that it is more language-based than procedural memory, declarative memory is also more easily forgotten unless it is consistently used. There are two basic subtypes of declarative memory: semantic and episodic. Semantic memory is related to the understanding of meanings or concepts, and is generally not personally relevant. Semantic dementia was first described by Arnold Pick in 1904, but is not caused by Pick's disease as often as the other two forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Semantic dementia is characterized by an inability of the patient to remember the meanings of words and visual cues.

Inflection - a change in the form of a word (usually by adding a suffix) to indicate a change in its grammatical function. One theory concerning foreign accent syndrome is that the sufferer is not actually speaking in a foreign accent at all, but the listener assigns one based on inflections and emphasis. Several Americans diagnosed with foreign accent syndrome are said to speak in a British accent, even though they have never visited the United Kingdom and have been raised in areas with strong native accents, such as New York. As well, each individual who reports or writes the news has to work hard to guard against his or her own opinions. These opinions can become media bias simply through word choice or inflections and tone of voice when delivering news. One form of media bias is failure to include varied points of view on a story.

http://www.wisegeek.com

Applied Linguistics: Lexicography

Perhaps the simplest explanation of lexicography is that it is a scholarly discipline that involves compiling, writing, or editing dictionaries. Lexicography is widely considered an independent scholarly discipline, though it is a subfield within linguistics.

Many consider lexicography to be divided into two related areas. The act of writing, or editing dictionaries is known as Practical Lexicography. The analysis or description of the vocabulary of a particular language, and the meaning that links certain words to others in a dictionary, is known as Theoretical Lexicography. Theoretical Lexicography is particularly concerned with developing theories regarding the structural and semantic relationships among words in the dictionary. Since it involves theoretical analysis of the lexicon, Theoretical Lexicography is also known as Metalexicography.

In order to better understand lexicography, it may help to know what a lexicon is. Lexicon is a term used in linguistics to indicate the archive of lexemes. Lexemes are abstract, minimal units in a language that link related forms of a word together. For example, the words fly, flight, flew, flying, and so on, are all morphologic variations of the lexeme fly. Fly is the lexeme because it is the base from which these word variations arise.

Applied Linguistics: Lexis

Lexis – this linguistic category falls under word construction and meaning and generally defined as the total word stock and usage that depends on choice and appropriateness. The presence of multi-word lexical items in the lexis is what differentiates it from vocabulary - the collection of only single words.

Example:

traffic light, take care of, by the way and don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Lexis means the vocabulary of a language as opposed to other aspects such as the grammar of the text. Lexis is clearly an important aspect of creating a suitable style or register (i.e. when choosing language and language features to suit a particular genre, context, audience and purpose).

Lexis and semantics are very close and often used interchangeably.

Lexical cohesion occurs when words have an affinity for each other as in collocations.Many words are habitually put together - or collocated. A collocation is any habitually linked group of words - a kind of lexical partnership, e.g. 'fish and chips', 'salt and pepper', 'don't mention it', 'it's nothing...', 'Oh well!', 'bangers and mash'... and so on.

source:

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Sunday, February 6, 2011

Eng 14: Language and Literature Activity 1

Instruction composition exercise:

In your own words, make an instruction on to tie a shoelace. Use enumeration.

Submit this on Friday, 11th of Feb.

Approaches to Language Testing

1. Essay-Translation Approach
    A. Characteristics and Types of Tests
          i.   Referred to as the pre-scientific stage
          ii.  No special skill or expertise in testing is required
          iii. Usually consist of essay writing, translation and grammatical analysis.
          iv. Heavy on literary and cultural bias.
          v. Public examinations resulting from the tests sometimes have an oral component at the upper intermediate and advance level.
    B. Strength
          i.   Easy to follow using subjective judgment
          ii. Maybe use for any level of examinees.
          iii. Model can be easily modified based on the essentials of the tests.
    C. Weakness
          i. Subjective judgment tends to be biased
          ii. Heavy literary and cultural bias.

2. Structuralist Approach
    A. Characteristics and Types of Tests
          i.   Primarily concerned with systematic acquisition of a set of habits.
          ii. Involves structural linguistics which stresses the importance of constructive analysis and the need to identify and measure the learner mastery of the separate elements of the target language ?phonology, vocabulary and grammar.
          iii. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are done in separate testing.
          iv. Uses psychometric approach to measurement with its emphasis on reliability and objectivity.
    B. Strengths
          i. Objective
          ii. Other forms of tests can be covered in the test in a short time
          iii. Can help students find their strengths and weaknesses in every skill they study.
    C. Weaknesses
          i. Complicated for teachers in questionnaire preparation
          ii. Measures non-integrated skills more than integrated skills.

3. Integrative Approach
   A. Characteristics and Types
         i. Known as language in context test and primarily concerned with total communicative effect of discourse.
         ii. Concerned with global view of proficiency.
         iii. Involves functional language but does not uses functional language
         iv. Uses cloze test, dictation, oral interview, translation and essay writing.
B. Strength
         i. Approach to meaning and the total communicative effect of discourse are very helpful to students
         ii. Can view students?proficiency with a global perspective.
         iii. Cloze test used in this approach measures the reader ability to decode interrupted messages by using available contextual clues.
         iv. Uses dictation test to measure students?listening comprehension skills.
C. Weaknesses
         This type of approach does not acknowledge the importance of measuring the individual skills based on students?need such as writing only, speaking only, etc.

4. Communicative Approach
    A. Characteristics and Types
        i. Concerned primarily with how language is used in communication
        ii. Emphasizes on the exclusion of language usage.
        iii. Measures language skills in communicative tests based on divisibility hypothesis.
        iv. Content should be relevant for a particular group of examinees and the tasks set should relate to real-life situation        v. Introduces qualitative modes of assessment

   B. Strengths
        i.   Measures integrated skills of students
        ii. Prepares students in real life communication problems
        iii. Measures all language skills (speaking, reading, listening, writing)
        iv. Detailed statements of each performance level serve to increase the reliability of the scoring by enabling the examiner to make decisions according to carefully drawn-up and well-established criteria.
   C. Weaknesses
        i. Does not emphasize learning structural grammar and expects examinees mastery of the grammar of a language
        ii. Cultural bias affects the reliability of the tests being administered.