Language standardization in sociolinguistics and international business: Theory and practice across the table

This chapter addresses the issue of language standardization from two perspectives, bringing together a theoretical perspective offered by the discipline of sociolinguistics with a practical example from international business. We introduce the broad concept of standardization and embed the study of language standardization in the wider discussion of standards as a means of control across society. We analyse the language policy and practice of the Danish multinational, Grundfos, and use it as a “sociolinguistic laboratory” to “test” the theory of language standardization initially elaborated by Einar Haugen to explain the history of modern Norwegian. The table is then turned and a model from International Business by Piekkari, Welch and Welch is used to illuminate recent Norwegian language planning. It is found that the Grundfos case works well with the Haugen model, and the International Business model provides a valuable practical lesson for national language planners, both showing that a “comparative standardology” is a valuable undertaking. More voices “at the table” will allow both theory and practice to be further refined and for the role of standards across society to be better understood.

Academics across borders: narratives of linguistic capital, language competence, and communication strategies

This article reports on a study that examined the personal employment paths of six international academics at a British university. To complement previous accounts of difficult migration, it focuses on the successful experiences of such academics, in particular how proficiency in English facilitated their move into employment in higher education (HE), and the linguistic competences and communication strategies they deploy in their daily activities. The article identifies key factors that have facilitated to their academic achievements and contributes to the understanding of the benefits and consequences of skilled migration. In conclusion, it suggests workplace pedagogy and policy responses that could facilitate other international academics' successful experiences in the UK HE sector.

Are Deep Learning Approaches Suitable for Natural Language Processing?

In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) techniques have gained much at-tention from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research communities because these approaches can often learn features from data without the need for human design or engineering interventions. In addition, DL approaches have achieved some remarkable results. In this paper, we have surveyed major recent contributions that use DL techniques for NLP tasks. All these reviewed topics have been limited to show contributions to text understand-ing, such as sentence modelling, sentiment classification, semantic role labelling, question answering, etc. We provide an overview of deep learning architectures based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Recursive Neural Networks (RNNs).

The user's view level of the GOQL graphical query language

The paper addresses issues related to the design of a graphical query mechanism that can act as an interface to any object-oriented database system (OODBS), in general, and the object model of ODMG 2.0, in particular. In the paper a brief literature survey of related work is given, and an analysis methodology that allows the evaluation of such languages is proposed. Moreover, the user's view level of a new graphical query language, namely GOQL (Graphical Object Query Language), for ODMG 2.0 is presented. The user's view level provides a graphical schema that does not contain any of the perplexing details of an object-oriented database schema, and it also provides a foundation for a graphical interface that can support ad-hoc queries for object-oriented database applications. We illustrate, using an example, the user's view level of GOQL

Welcoming International Visitors - Communication and Culture

It is extremely rare for an international visitor to museums and galleries in the UK to find information in foreign languages which is anything more than a relatively literal translation of an English source text. At the same time, a huge body of research and theory in the humanities and social sciences implies that major cultural differences are likely to accompany the differences in first language of international visitors. As such, in spite of the fact that museums and galleries often declare their intention to meet the needs of their visitors, it is fairly clear that, in this instance, they are at best meeting their international visitors’ linguistic needs whilst ignoring their broader cultural needs. With this in mind, staff from the University of Westminster together with a number of London’s major museums and galleries obtained UK Research Council funding to work on the production of leaflets in foreign languages fully acknowledging cultural differences amongst international visitors. The collaboration was intended to generate reflection on how such materials might be most effectively produced, what impact they might have and what forms of policy review museums and galleries might as a result wish to undertake. The collaboration confirmed that cultural difference, and therefore difference in need, between visitors with different first languages is a simple reality. Translations, including ones which are culturally ‘adapted’ or ‘sensitive’, will always fall short of acknowledging the intercultural complexity of the experience of international visitors. Materials acknowledging that complexity are more effective. Museums and galleries need, therefore, to ask themselves how far and in what ways they wish to acknowledge this reality in the nature of the welcome they offer. The core of this article will draw on the outcomes of this collaboration, and also on aspects of translation and intercultural theory, to offer a critical exploration of some of the options museums and galleries therefore have in producing materials to welcome international visitors in ways which acknowledge the intercultural complexity of their experience.

An ethnographic investigation into gender and language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

This paper investigates the extent to which the negative evaluation of one of the women Ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly can be attributed to gender. Interviews with politicians as well as the Minister herself illuminate this discussion by identifying the ‘gendered discourses’ that are drawn upon when describing the Minister’s communicative style in debates. Close analyses of transcripts of debates offer a description of some elements of this style, and find that while the Minister is confrontational in debates and ‘stands her ground’, she does not take part in illegal interventions that disrupt the debate floor and are characteristic of the Assembly as a whole. Although the construction of the Minister’s unpopularity can be attributed to a complex interplay of factors, it can be concluded that it is partly the way she draws on gendered linguistic resources that leads her to be negatively judged by her peers.