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Turkish-to-English short story translation by DeepL: Human evaluation by trainees and translation professionals vs. automatic evaluation
No full textThis mixed-methods study aims to evaluate the quality of Turkish-to-English literary machine translation by DeepL, incorporating both human and automatic evaluation metrics while engaging translation trainees and professional translators. Raw MT output of two short stories, Mendil Altında and Kabak Çekirdekçi, evaluated by both groups via TAUS DQF tool and evaluators wrote reports on the detected errors. Additionally, BLEU was employed for automatic evaluation. The results indicate a consensus between trainees and professionals in assessing MT accuracy and fluency. Accuracy rates were 80.59% and 80.50% for Mendil Altında, and 73.08% and 82.35% for Kabak Çekirdekçi. Fluency rates were similarly close, 71.96% and 72.32% for Mendil Altında, and 66.81% and 62.09% for Kabak Çekirdekçi. Bleu scores, particularly 1-gram results, align with the human evaluators’ results. Furthermore, reports show that trainees provided more detailed analysis, frequently using meta-language, suggesting that increased exposure to metrics enhances trainees’ ability to identify fine-grained MT errors
Self-repair and motivation in legal and medical simultaneous interpreting: reflections from student Interpreters
No full textThe present study examines the similarities and differences in the use of self-repairs by student interpreters during simultaneous interpreting of two different speech types, medical and legal, as well as the underlying motivations behind these repairs. With this aim in mind, this case study involves an English-to-Turkish simultaneous interpreting experiment with 7 senior student interpreters enrolled in Simultaneous Interpreting course at a major university in İzmir, Türkiye, and corroborated with a post-experiment questionnaire and student reflective reports within the scope of Schön’s concept of “reflection”. Shen and Liang’s taxonomy of self-repair strategies was used for data analysis, and findings were then discussed in line with Daniel Gile’s Effort Model. The findings revealed that challenges arising from syntactic asymmetries, cognitive load, and short-term memory triggered student interpreters’ self-repairs during the interpreting process. As for the self-repair strategies, repetition comes forward as the most commonly used type in both speech types, yet there is a statistical difference between the total number used in the legal and the medical speech. Furthermore, the students’ statements showed no correlation between the number of self-repairs, speech difficulty, and perceived interpreting performance. This finding suggests that self-repair is not always an indicator of poor interpreting performance and error correction; instead, it can serve as a cognitive strategy to manage time, achieve semantic clarity, and enhance the comprehensibility of renditions
Henry James and The Aspern papers: Archive, memory, and the failure of biography
No full textThis paper examines The Aspern Papers by Henry James through the lens of archive theory, biographical ethics, and the complexities of memory preservation. It explores how the protagonist’s obsessive pursuit of Aspern’s documents represents the human desire to reconstruct the Romantic past in Gothic atmosphere of Venice, often at the expense of ethical considerations and lived experience. The analysis highlights the symbolic significance of Juliana Bordereau, not merely as a guardian of Aspern’s legacy but as a living archive whose testimony remains undervalued. The paper connects James’s themes to his personal decision to destroy his own letters, reflecting his scepticism toward biographical intrusions. Comparisons with The Sense of the Past and other Jamesian works illustrate recurring motifs of archival failure and the tension between material and immaterial memory, as well as the role of destruction – both literal, through the burning of documents, and metaphorical, through the erasure of identities – in shaping historical narrative. Finally, the discussion extends to the ethical responsibilities of archivists and biographers, questioning whether written records alone can ever truly encapsulate the essence of a life
The political uses and abuses of 'gender' in translation
No full textThe paper attends to the relationship between translation, language, and politics, focusing on the appropriation of the key Anglo-American feminist term 'gender' into Bulgarian and its political uses and abuses in the recent context of the global crusade against the so called 'gender ideology'. It traces the troubled history of the term which was transplanted in the post-communist world in the 1990s via translation but has not been well translated and understood in Bulgarian society. Through an array of specific examples from diverse registers such as academic publications, institutional policy papers, and EU documents in translation, the paper aims to show how inconsistency and inaccuracy in translation practices have had political consequences during and after the campaign against the ratification of the Istanbul convention on the prevention and combating of violence against women, when the term was highly contested and emptied out of meaning. It is argued that conservative forces have instrumentalized the linguistic confusion surrounding ambiguous and poor translations of the term 'gender' to trigger deeper fears and prejudices related to women's equality, transgender rights, and the EU liberal agenda. Working at the intersection of feminist politics of location and politics of translation, the paper poses questions about the limits of translatability and applicability of major transnational feminist terms. It also offers some options for getting out of the gender impasse in Bulgarian translation
Integrating translation project management into translator training as a part of translation technology course
No full textTranslation project management has become an indispensable part of the professional translation process with ever-increasing translation volume and complicated translation jobs. Given the essence of translation project management for the translation industry, translator training programs are also expected to equip their students with the relevant translation project management skills. To this end, this study aims to uncover the trainee translators' views of translation project management tools taught within the context of a translation technology course. Based on the data collected with open-ended questions followed by semi-structured short individual interviews, the study attempted to explore the practices needed to integrate essential project management skills and special tools into translator training. After a scrutinized thematic analysis of collected data, the phrases and patterns were noted, and then they were classified to form the themes. The findings show that students support the use of scenario-based instruction; problem-solving skills are improved through scenarios; using scenarios provides a collaborative learning environment. The interpretation of the responses also draws attention to the need for computer labs dedicated to translation departments and underlines the individual differences among students in terms of working in a team
Object insertion in Old English verbs of throwing: A corpus-based study
No full textThis study demonstrates for the first time that ballistic motion is part of Old English ditransitives, functioning in the Nominative-Accusative-Dative construction. A search for throw terms in A Thesaurus of Old English generates a pilot list of candidates, whose participation in ditransitives is verified through queries performed on the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. The findings reveal a relatively diverse group of 14 verb types and 51 tokens expressing deictically directed transfer (i.e., throwing to and from), with some units emphasizing force or manner of motion. In line with Diachronic Construction Grammar, the new verb class is incorporated into a lexicality-schematicity hierarchy, a semantic map proposal for the group is discussed in detail, and the argument structure of Old English throw verbs is formalized into boxes and described. This study pays particular attention to the typological distinction between basic and derived coding frames, and, more specifically, to object insertion as a mechanism for generating ditransitives from primary caused-motion constructions. A comparison of the argument structures found in the Old English corpus with those of their modern English counterparts suggests a lower degree of constructionalization in the Old English throw group, based on the frequent presence of a fourth argument, a directional
Walt Whitman and the Image of the Poet-Bard after the Publication of His Novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle
Full text linkThe image of Walt Whitman is presented as a synthesis of a number of ideas of the world's philosophers, cultural studies scholars, literary scholars and critics writing about him. Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of the Poet-Priest becomes the intellectual form to be fulfilled through his forthcoming physical and mental-emotional performance. Whitman applies it to his attempt to live as a poet and turn his life into a poem. Behind it all lies a plan connected to the poet's self-creation as the bard of the nation, whose autobiography fits into his chosen mission. This plan, however, does not include his prose publications. As a result, Walt Whitman's creative path is explored in a broader context that has a significant impact on the poet's image. Thus, the discovery of the novel written in 1852 entitled Life and Adventures of Jack Engle and rediscovered in 2017 (Stefan Radev, 2018), reveals valuable facts that not only shift certain paradigms but definitively reinforce the iconic image formed. Spirituality itself, so highly valued and omnipresent in his writing, charges him with constant positivity. Thus he too, as a poet, becomes an eternal optimist, devoid of guilt, which had its beginnings in the rediscovered novel
Four Innovative Teaching Methods. Is There a Place for Post-Pedagogy?
No full textThe article examines the need for a new pedagogical framework in the context of contemporary higher education, influenced by digital innovations and generational change. It introduces four innovative pedagogical approaches – Description of an Object, Humanities Laboratory, Venus of Slatina, and Time Machine – which serve as a basis for discussing 'post-pedagogy'. The approaches are united by the goal of achieving priorities such as interdisciplinary training, critical thinking, and the encouragement of curiosity. By proposing the integration of these methods, the article aims to draw attention to the changed landscape of the educational field
Applied methods for 3D modeling of radio engineering devices
Full text linkThe aim of the paper is to present applied methods for engineering 3D modeling of pyramidal and conical horn antennas, which can contribute to the implementation of experimental research, both in a simulation and in a physical environment. The practical results presented at each step of the model building process are represented by screenshots of the work screen showing the used toolbars from the Autodesk 123D Design software menu. This is done with a view to improving the quality of training in areas related to the study of radio engineering devices, such as telecommunications engineering and aerospace engineering, in which the design and manufacture of various types of antennas help to conduct independent empirical research by the trainees with the help of measuring equipment