El predomínio del inglês en el lenguaje científico: características del lenguaje médico español en la actualidad

Sin lugar a dudas, el inglés se ha convertido en las últimas décadas en la lingua franca de la comunidad científica internacional, desplazando incluso a otras lenguas que tuvieron una gran importancia en otras épocas, caso del francés o del alemán. El lenguaje científico español también ha sucumbido a esta entrada masiva del inglés en las distintas disciplinas científico-técnicas, y presenta desde hace unas décadas ciertas características que no son propias de las reglas gramaticales del español y que son el fruto de una contaminación lingüística derivada de la penetración del inglés. El objetivo del presente artículo es analizar las características del lenguaje médico tal y como lo podemos encontrar en las publicaciones españolas actuales. Para ello, el artículo se divide en tres apartados: en primer lugar, haremos un breve recorrido por la historia del lenguaje médico como punto de partida para comprender la evolución de este lenguaje. En segundo lugar, analizaremos las características principales dentro de los niveles léxicosemántico, morfosintáctico y fonético-fonológico del lenguaje médico español y veremos la influencia que ha tenido el inglés en el proceso de evolución del mismo. En tercer lugar, examinaremos los procedimientos de creación y formación de términos médicos y cómo afectan al desarrollo lingüístico de la terminología.

Tradução e poesia: actividades irreconciliáveis?

Associar tradução e poesia será, muitas vezes, sinónimo de enfrentar preconceitos académicos e científicos muito enraizados na cultura ocidental. Se, por um lado, a tradução é vista como indispensável à troca de informações entre códigos linguísticos diferentes e até mesmo como a possibilitadora de avanços científicos e tecnológicos decorrentes do contacto com outras realidades economicamente mais evoluídas, a verdade é que o seu papel enquanto “ponte” cultural está longe de ser aceite universalmente quando em causa passam a estar os “tesouros literários” de uma cultura nacional. Este carácter polémico levou-me a ponderar a hipótese de analisar, de um ponto de vista eminentemente prático, quatro traduções dissemelhantes, de épocas também distintas, do poema The Tyger, de William Blake. Ter ao dispor quatro traduções de quatro tradutores diferentes tornou possível a compilação de um corpus mais alargado e diversificado onde basear conclusões reais para os problemas de tradução de poesia, devidamente contextualizados.

A interferência linguística na aquisição da língua espanhola na 3.º ciclo do ensino básico: erros frequentes e caminhos a percorrer

Mestrado em Ensino de Inglês e de Francês ou Espanhol no Ensino Básico

Transtextualidade na tradução de "Der mann im fahrstuhl / The mann in the elevator"

In an age where Babel has turned into transcultural communication, an interlingual approach – i.e. in English and in French – to the translating process from German to Portuguese appeared pertinent. Aiming at a refinement of the translating competence, this process consists in contrasting different linguistic and literary strategies through an intercultural and multi-etymological perspective. Thus, we settled upon Heiner Müller‘s play Der Auftrag. Erinnerung an eine Revolution (1980), on which the composer Heiner Goebbels has based himself to textually and musically dramatize an excerpt, Der Mann im Farhstuhl / The Man in the Elevator. A transcription of such excerpt in its source language, German, as well as its translation into English (Carl Weber, 1984, Performing Arts Publications, New York) and French (Jean Jourdheuil, Heinz Schwarzinger, Editions Minuit, Paris) can be found in the booklet that accompanies the CD – edited in 1988 by ECD (München: Records GmbH). It should be emphasized that such a creation allows a framing of Müller‘s text into a musical scenography and, therefore, encourages an intersemiotic contrast. This experience enabled us to come up with a unique imagery of Müller‘s piece of writing, by means of its dramatic and musical conversion and, simultaneously, lead us to stretch our textual consciousness to a multitude of intra-, extra- and interlinguistic elements.

Alright: a distinctive pathway of change from the 18th century to the present day

The origins of the vast majority of the words we use in contemporary English go back as far as Old or Middle English. In contrast, alright and all right in their present-day application appear to be the result of a more recent evolution, as there is no evidence of their use, not even in the two-word form, in the published fiction before the 18th century. Furthermore, there are not in the research literature, at least to my knowledge, any previous linguistic studies on this specific subject matter. The present article is simply an attempt to describe the various processes of diachronic change that brought about the emergence of alright.

Traduzir palavras, aproximar culturas: o ensino da Interpretação de Acompanhamento no ISCAP

Numa sociedade onde as correntes migrações desenham um novo contexto de sociabilização e onde a globalização conduz ao aumento incomensurável das reuniões interculturais, é fulcral recentrar a importância do ensino da interpretação dita de comunidade. A inauguração do Mestrado em Tradução e Interpretação Especializadas, no ano lectivo de 2007/2008, no Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto, reformulado a partir da Licenciatura Bi-Etápica homónima, veio apresentar um desenho dos curricula em Interpretação cujo entendimento é mais pragmático. Assim sendo, à tradicional divisão entre Interpretação Simultânea e Interpretação Consecutiva sucedeu a introdução das unidades curriculares de Interpretação de Conferência, Interpretação Remota e de Teleconferência e de Interpretação de Acompanhamento. Este estudo pretende apresentar e discutir as diferentes abordagens pedagógicas ensaiadas no decorrer da implementação da unidade curricular de Interpretação de Acompanhamento, sustentadas por uma reflexão de cariz científico-pedagógico, filtrada pelas tendências de investigação mais recentes nesta área. Adoptámos a designação de Interpretação de Acompanhamento para descrever uma situação comunicativa que decorre em contextos variados e heterogéneos, em detrimento de outras designações de abrangência mais restrita, como Interpretação de Liaison – que remete para um acompanhamento em contexto de negócios ou de visita cultural ou turística – e Interpretação de Comunidade – reportando-se à mediação linguística de alguém que não fala a linguagem da maioria, normalmente no âmbito judicial, social, ou de saúde. Concentraremos, por conseguinte, a nossa atenção nas questões que se seguem: Que estratégias pedagógicas melhor se adaptam ao ensino desta disciplina? Como reproduzir a heterogeneidade dos contextos comunicativos que a Interpretação de Acompanhamento envolve numa sala de aula? Que ponderação deve assumir o desempenho linguístico em comparação com as competências de mediação intercultural? Como integrar, na prática, conceitos e teorias no domínio da Interpretação de Acompanhamento?

The invisible factors that can make the difference. Language management and knowledge transfer in multinational sites

The knowledge-based society we live in has stressed the importance of human capital and brought talent to the top of most wanted skills, especially to companies who want to succeed in turbulent environments worldwide. In fact, streams, sequences of decisions and resource commitments characterize the day-to-day of multinational companies (MNCs). Such decision-making activities encompass major strategic moves like internationalization and new market entries or diversification and acquisitions. In most companies, these strategic decisions are extensively discussed and debated and are generally framed, formulated, and articulated in specialized language often developed by the best minds in the company. Yet the language used in such deliberations, in detailing and enacting the implementation strategy is usually taken for granted and receives little if any explicit attention (Brannen & Doz, 2012) an can still be a “forgotten factor” (Marschan et al. 1997). Literature on language management and international business refers to lack of awareness of business managers of the impact that language can have not only in communication effectiveness but especially in knowledge transfer and knowledge management in business environments. In the context of MNCs, management is, for many different reasons, more complex and demanding than that of a national company, mainly because of diversity factors inherent to internationalization, namely geographical and cultural spaces, i.e, varied mindsets. Moreover, the way of functioning, and managing language, of the MNC depends on its vision, its values and its internationalization model, i.e on in the way the MNE adapts to and controls the new markets, which can vary essentially from a more ethnocentric to a more pluricentric focus. Regardless of the internationalization model followed by the MNC, communication between different business units is essential to achieve unity in diversity and business sustainability. For the business flow and prosperity, inter-subsidiary, intra-company and company-client (customers, suppliers, governments, municipalities, etc..) communication must work in various directions and levels of the organization. If not well managed, this diversity can be a barrier to global coordination and create turbulent environments, even if a good technological support is available (Feely et al., 2002: 4). According to Marchan-Piekkari (1999) the tongue can be both (i) a barrier, (ii) a facilitator and (iii) a source of power. Moreover, the lack of preparation for the barriers of linguistic diversity can lead to various costs, including negotiations’ failure and failure on internationalization.. On the other hand, communication and language fluency is not just a message transfer procedure, but above all a knowledge transfer process, which requires extra-linguistic skills (persuasion, assertiveness …) in order to promote credibility of both parties. For this reason, MNCs need a common code to communicate and trade information inside and outside the company, which will require one or more strategies, in order to overcome possible barriers and organization distortions.

Qual a função dos corpora na descrição do léxico?

Neste artigo procuramos reflectir sobre a função dos corpora na observação e análise de fenómenos de uma língua natural bem como na criação de novos recursos de exploração linguísticos que as tecnologias de informação têm vindo a potenciar e a tornar mais eficaz.

Audiovisual translation on Portuguese news bulletin

The daily access to news broadcast is something that, generally speaking, we do not abstain ourselves from, whether it is to be aware of what is going on in our country or to be informed about international events. But are we attentive to how the information about those events, namely those that occur outside Portugal, reaches us? How is that information handled – and who handles it – until we have it at our disposal? Is the audience aware that a large part of the news must be translated and must have a linguistic treatment? And how can we describe that same translation and the way it is presented? This case study is just an example of translation‘s role and its crucial presence on TV news broadcast, considering the way translation is processed, how it is barely noticed – or not –, how it influences the construction of the story and how the story influences the translation process. This case study was presented at the 2nd International Conference ―Media for All‖, with the theme ―Text on Air, Text on Screen‖, which took place at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, on 7-9 November 2007. O acesso diário a serviços informativos noticiosos é algo de que, de um modo geral, não nos privamos, seja para ficar a par do que se passa no nosso país, seja para ficarmos mais informados sobre eventos e acontecimentos internacionais. Mas teremos noção de como essas informações sobre esses acontecimentos, nomeadamente os que têm lugar fora de Portugal, chegam até nós? Qual será o tratamento dado a essas informações – e quem trata essas informações – até serem colocadas à nossa disposição? Será que o público, de um modo geral, se apercebe que grande parte das notícias é alvo de tratamento tradutológico e linguístico? E como se caracterizará essa tradução e a forma de apresentação da mesma? O presente estudo de caso é apenas um exemplo do papel e da presença fulcral da tradução em serviços noticiosos televisivos, seja pela forma como é feita, pelo modo como passa despercebida (ou não), pela influência que terá na construção da peça noticiosa e pela influência que a peça noticiosa terá no modo como se processa a tradução. Este estudo de caso foi apresentado na 2ª Conferência Internacional ―Media for All‖, subordinada ao tema ―Text on Air, Text on Screen‖, que teve lugar no Instituto Politécnico de Leiria de 7 a 9 de Novembro de 2007.

Phonological and articulation treatment approaches in Portuguese children with speech and language impairments: a randomized controlled intervention study

Background: In Portugal, the routine clinical practice of speech and language therapists (SLTs) in treating children with all types of speech sound disorder (SSD) continues to be articulation therapy (AT). There is limited use of phonological therapy (PT) or phonological awareness training in Portugal. Additionally, at an international level there is a focus on collecting information on and differentiating between the effectiveness of PT and AT for children with different types of phonologically based SSD, as well as on the role of phonological awareness in remediating SSD. It is important to collect more evidence for the most effective and efficient type of intervention approach for different SSDs and for these data to be collected from diverse linguistic and cultural perspectives. Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of a PT and AT approach for treatment of 14 Portuguese children, aged 4.0–6.7 years, with a phonologically based SSD. Methods & Procedures: The children were randomly assigned to one of the two treatment approaches (seven children in each group). All children were treated by the same SLT, blind to the aims of the study, over three blocks of a total of 25 weekly sessions of intervention. Outcome measures of phonological ability (percentage of consonants correct (PCC), percentage occurrence of different phonological processes and phonetic inventory) were taken before and after intervention. A qualitative assessment of intervention effectiveness from the perspective of the parents of participants was included. Outcomes & Results: Both treatments were effective in improving the participants’ speech, with the children receiving PT showing a more significant improvement in PCC score than those receiving the AT. Children in the PT group also showed greater generalization to untreated words than those receiving AT. Parents reported both intervention approaches to be as effective in improving their children’s speech. Conclusions & Implications: The PT (combination of expressive phonological tasks, phonological awareness, listening and discrimination activities) proved to be an effective integrated method of improving phonological SSD in children. These findings provide some evidence for Portuguese SLTs to employ PT with children with phonologically based SSD

Mismatch negativity in childhood temporal lobe epilepsy: a proposed paradigm for testing central auditory processing

Background: Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is a neurological disorder that directly affects cortical areas responsible for auditory processing. The resulting abnormalities can be assessed using event-related potentials (ERP), which have high temporal resolution. However, little is known about TLE in terms of dysfunction of early sensory memory encoding or possible correlations between EEGs, linguistic deficits, and seizures. Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an ERP component – elicited by introducing a deviant stimulus while the subject is attending to a repetitive behavioural task – which reflects pre-attentive sensory memory function and reflects neuronal auditory discrimination and perceptional accuracy. Hypothesis: We propose an MMN protocol for future clinical application and research based on the hypothesis that children with TLE may have abnormal MMN for speech and non-speech stimuli. The MMN can be elicited with a passive auditory oddball paradigm, and the abnormalities might be associated with the location and frequency of epileptic seizures. Significance: The suggested protocol might contribute to a better understanding of the neuropsychophysiological basis of MMN. We suggest that in TLE central sound representation may be decreased for speech and non-speech stimuli. Discussion: MMN arises from a difference to speech and non-speech stimuli across electrode sites. TLE in childhood might be a good model for studying topographic and functional auditory processing and its neurodevelopment, pointing to MMN as a possible clinical tool for prognosis, evaluation, follow-up, and rehabilitation for TLE.

F-LQE: a Fuzzy Link Quality Estimator for wireless sensor networks

Radio Link Quality Estimation (LQE) is a fundamental building block for Wireless Sensor Networks, namely for a reliable deployment, resource management and routing. Existing LQEs (e.g. PRR, ETX, Fourbit, and LQI ) are based on a single link property, thus leading to inaccurate estimation. In this paper, we propose F-LQE, that estimates link quality on the basis of four link quality properties: packet delivery, asymmetry, stability, and channel quality. Each of these properties is defined in linguistic terms, the natural language of Fuzzy Logic. The overall quality of the link is specified as a fuzzy rule whose evaluation returns the membership of the link in the fuzzy subset of good links. Values of the membership function are smoothed using EWMA filter to improve stability. An extensive experimental analysis shows that F-LQE outperforms existing estimators.

Inglês: atividade de enriquecimento ou disciplina curricular?

Mestrado em Ensino Precoce do Inglês

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

El cambio del perfil del profesional de recursos humanos en Portugal

El presente estudio pretende caracterizar el perfil de los profesionales responsables por la gestión de recursos humanos, en concreto su perfil académico, las funciones que ocupan y los requisitos demandados por las empresas portuguesas que pretenden admitir a nuevos profesionales para asumir funciones en el ámbito de la gestión de personas. Este estudio está basado en una encuesta por cuestionario realizado a una muestra de 261 responsables de recursos humanos de empresas ubicadas en Portugal (133 fueron encuestados en 2004, 128 fueron encuestados en 2013). En paralelo, fueron analizados 78 anuncios publicados en 2014 para identificar el perfil requerido en la actualidad. Los resultados muestran que, durante los últimos 10 años, la gran parte de los profesionales responsables por la gestión de recursos humanos asumen papeles específicos relacionados con los recursos humanos (RH). La calificación superior en RH empieza logrando más importancia en 2013, cuando se compara con otras áreas de calificación superior (ej. Gestión, Derecho e Ingeniería) prevalecientes en 2004. Las vacantes disponibles en anuncios relacionados con la función de RH buscan, sobretodo, candidatos (1) para asumir el cargo de técnico de RH, (2) que posean calificación superior en las áreas de RH o Ciencias Sociales y (3) que detengan competencias personales e interpersonales, así como competencias lingüísticas e informáticas. Basado en estos resultados, el artículo discute en detalle las principales implicaciones teóricas y prácticas. Sugestiones de investigación futura son, de igual modo, presentadas.