Translating Spanish Literature into English: Some cross-cultural pragmatic issues

Eterio Pajares, Raquel Merino y José Miguel Santamaría (eds.)

A semantic middleware to enhance current multimedia retrieval systems with content-based functionalities

210 p. : graf.

PPs without Disguises: Reply to Bruening

[EN]Bresnan and Nikitina (2009) and Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008) show that, contrary to standard assumptions, fixed-theme idioms may appear in to-constructions under certain pragmatic circumstances. Bruening (2010a) contends that the cases they present are in fact R(ightward)-dative shifts, double object constructions with the object projected to the right. In this article, we argue that Bruening’s proposed theoretical apparatus is unnecessarily complex and ad hoc and falls short of explaining the main facts it is supposed to deal with, massively overgenerating. A regular PP structure is argued to be empirically more adequate and conceptually simpler, avoiding the main problems of the R-dative shift analysis. New empirical evidence concerning pairlist readings and scope freezing also suggests that the empirical facts about idioms should be reconsidered in completely different terms.

On demand translation for querying incompletely aligned datasets

More and more users aim at taking advantage of the existing Linked Open Data environment to formulate a query over a dataset and to then try to process the same query over different datasets, one after another, in order to obtain a broader set of answers. However, the heterogeneity of vocabularies used in the datasets on the one side, and the fact that the number of alignments among those datasets is scarce on the other, makes that querying task difficult for them. Considering this scenario we present in this paper a proposal that allows on demand translations of queries formulated over an original dataset, into queries expressed using the vocabulary of a targeted dataset. Our approach relieves users from knowing the vocabulary used in the targeted datasets and even more it considers situations where alignments do not exist or they are not suitable for the formulated query. Therefore, in order to favour the possibility of getting answers, sometimes there is no guarantee of obtaining a semantically equivalent translation. The core component of our proposal is a query rewriting model that considers a set of transformation rules devised from a pragmatic point of view. The feasibility of our scheme has been validated with queries defined in well known benchmarks and SPARQL endpoint logs, as the obtained results confirm.

Enseñanza de español a alumnado anglófono

Este trabajo ofrece un análisis contrastivo entre los idiomas inglés y español en sus diferentes niveles: fonético-fonológico, morfosintáctico, léxico-semántico, rasgos paralingüísticos y pragmático-cultural, poniendo especial énfasis en las principales diferencias que se dan entre ambos. Está especialmente dirigido a todo el profesorado de español que enseñe esta lengua al alumnado anglófono, ya sea como LE o L2, ya que resulta útil para comprender las principales dificultades que presenta este alumnado en su proceso de aprendizaje de la lengua española.