Language and trade: the (new) route of portuguese in the 21st century

Globalisation has eliminated frontiers and in the case of Europe helped the crossing of borders and changed forever the concept of social (and I would also say individual) geography: the rest of the world is out there; we can pretend not to see it, but we cannot avoid it. Moreover, Europe is undergoing a serious crisis, also economic, and new markets and business partners are welcome. In this context, cultural bonds like a common language can open new investment paths and give rise to successful stories. In this paper we intend to present an example of how low linguistic distance can lead to good business, even if a) in the internationalization process of the companies’ language is often forgotten as a management element and b) consumers of language products (like User Guides) are also not stimulating investment in language by the companies. Through the results of 2 studies carried out in 2010 and 2011 we will show how a pluricentric language like Portuguese is managed in multinational companies (MC) and Small and medium Enterprises (SMEs). The second study is based on an online survey questioning the effectiveness, efficiency and general quality of User Guides and the reaction of consumers to language. Results show that although playing a role in the internationalization process of companies in the same linguistic space, language is opportunistically used. On the other hand, Portuguese and Brazilian consumers show a very functional perception of the Portuguese language...

Construction of womanhood in the bengali language of Bangladesh

The subject-matter of this essay is gender justice in language which, as I argue, may be achieved through the development of a gender-related approach to linguistic human rights. The last decades of the 20th century, globally marked by a “gender shift” in attitudes to language policy, gave impetus to the social movement for promoting linguistic gender equality. It was initiated in Western Europe and nowadays is moving eastwards, as ideas of gender democracy progress into developing countries. But, while in western societies gender discrimination through language, or linguistic sexism, was an issue of concern for over three decades, in developing countries efforts to promote gender justice in language are only in their infancy. My argument is that to promote gender justice in language internationally it is necessary to acknowledge the rights of women and men to equal representation of their gender in language and speech and, therefore, raise a question of linguistic rights of the sexes. My understanding is that the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights in 1996 provided this opportunity to address the problem of gender justice in language as a human rights issue, specifically as a gender dimension of linguistic human rights.

Formal Contracts for Runtime Verification Support in the Ada Programming Language

Poster presented in The 28th GI/ITG International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS 2015). 24 to 26, Mar, 2015. Porto, Portugal.

Some translation difficulties in the use of false friends in english

This paper will focus on some aspects of translation based on blending distinct linguistic domains such as English Language and Portuguese in using false friends in the English class in tertiary level students, reflecting namely on: 1. the choice of a word suitable to the context in L2 ; 2. the difficulties encountered by choice of that word that could be misleading, by relying in a false L1 reality that is going to adulterate reality in the L2 domain; 3. the difficulty in making such type of distinctions due to the lack of linguistic and lexical knowledge. 4. the need to study the cause of these difficulties by working, not only with their peers, but also with their language teacher to develop strategies to diminish and if possible to eradicate this type of linguistic and, above all, translation problem by making an inventory of those types of mistakes. In relation to the first point it is necessary to know that translation tasks involve much more than literal concepts ( Ladmiral, 1975) : furthermore it is necessary and suitable to realise that lexicon relies in significant contexts (Coseriu 1966), which connects both domains, that, at first sight do not seem to be compatible. In other words, although students have the impression they dominate lexicon due to the fact that they possess at least seven years of foreign language exposure that doesn’t mean they master the particularities engaged in such a delicate task as translation is concerned. There are some chromaticisms in the words (false friends), that need to be researched and analysed later on by both students and language teachers. The reason for such state of affairs lies in their academic formation, of a mainly general stream, which has enabled them only for knowledge of the foreign language, but not for the translation as a tool as it is required only when they reach the tertiary level. Besides, for their translations they rely, most of the times, on glossaries, whose dominant language is portuguese of Brazil, which is, obviously, much different from the portuguese mother tongue reality and even more of English. So it seems necessary to use with caution the working tools (glossaries) that work as surpluses, but could bring translation problems as we will see.

Eastwards / westwards: which direction for gender studies in the 21st century?

Eastwards / Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the XXIst Century? is a collection of essays which focus on themes and methods that characterize current research into gender in Asian countries in general. In this collection, ideas derived from Gender Studies elsewhere in the world have been subjected to scrutiny for their utility in helping to describe and understand regional phenomena. But the concepts of Local and Global – with their discoursive productions – have not functioned as a binary opposition: localism and globalism are mutually constitutive and researchers have interrogated those spaces of interaction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, bearing in mind their own embeddedness in social and cultural structures and their own historical memory. Contributors to this collection provided a critical transnational perspective on some of the complex effects of the dynamics of cultural globalization, by exploring the relation between gender and development, language, historiography, education and culture. We have also given attention to the ideological and rhetorical processes through which gender identity is constructed, by comparing textual grids and patterns of expectation. Likewise, we have discussed the role of ethnography, anthropology, historiography, sociology, fiction, popular culture and colonial and post-colonial sources in (re)inventing old/new male/female identities, their conversion into concepts and circulation through time and space. This multicultural and trans-disciplinary selection of essays is totally written in English, fully edited and revised, therefore, it has a good potential for an immediate international circulation. This project may trace new paths and issues for discussion on what concerns the life, practices and narratives by and about women in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the present day global experience. Academic readership: Researchers, scholars, educators, graduate and post-graduate students, doctoral students and general non-fiction readers, with a special interest in Gender Studies, Asia, Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, Historiography, Politics, Race, Feminism, Language, Linguistics, Power, Political and Feminist Agendas, Popular Culture, Education, Women’s Writing, Religion, Multiculturalism, Globalisation, Migration. Chapter summary: 1. “Social Gender Stereotypes and their Implication in Hindi”, Anjali Pande, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. This essay looks at the subtle ways in which gender identities are constructed and reinforced in India through social norms of language use. Language itself becomes a medium for perpetuating gender stereotypes, forcing its speakers to confirm to socially defined gender roles. Using examples from a classroom discussion about a film, this essay will highlight the underlying rigid male-female stereotypes in Indian society with their more obvious expressions in language. For the urban woman in India globalisation meant increased economic equality and exposure to changed lifestyles. On an individual level it also meant redefining gender relations and changing the hierarchy in man-­woman relationships. With the economic independence there is a heightened sense of liberation in all spheres of social life, a confidence to fuzz the rigid boundaries of gender roles. With the new films and media celebrating this liberated woman, who is ready to assert her sexual needs, who is ready to explode those long held notions of morality, one would expect that the changes are not just superficial. But as it soon became obvious in the course of a classroom discussion about relationships and stereotypes related to age, the surface changes can not become part of the common vocabulary, for the obvious reason that there is still a vast gap between the screen image of this new woman and the ground reality. Social considerations define the limits of this assertiveness of women, whereas men are happy to be liberal within the larger frame of social sanctions. The educated urban woman in India speaks in favour of change and the educated urban male supports her, but one just needs to scratch the surface to see the time tested formulae of gender roles firmly in place. The way the urban woman happily balances this emerging promise of independence with her gendered social identity, makes it necessary to rethink some aspects of looking at gender in a gradually changing, traditional society like India. 2. “The Linguistic Dimension of Gender Equality”, Alissa Tolstokorova, Kiev Centre for Gender Information and Education, Ukraine. The subject-matter of this essay is gender justice in language which, as I argue, may be achieved through the development of a gender-related approach to linguistic human rights. The last decades of the 20th century, globally marked by a “gender shift” in attitudes to language policy, gave impetus to the social movement for promoting linguistic gender equality. It was initiated in Western Europe and nowadays is moving eastwards, as ideas of gender democracy progress into developing countries. But, while in western societies gender discrimination through language, or linguistic sexism, was an issue of concern for over three decades, in developing countries efforts to promote gender justice in language are only in their infancy. My argument is that to promote gender justice in language internationally it is necessary to acknowledge the rights of women and men to equal representation of their gender in language and speech and, therefore, raise a question of linguistic rights of the sexes. My understanding is that the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights in 1996 provided this opportunity to address the problem of gender justice in language as a human rights issue, specifically as a gender dimension of linguistic human rights. 3. “The Rebirth of an Old Language: Issues of Gender Equality in Kazakhstan”, Maria Helena Guimarães, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. The existing language situation in Kazakhstan, while peaceful, is not without some tension. We propose to analyze here some questions we consider relevant in the frame of cultural globalization and gender equality, such as: free from Russian imperialism, could Kazakhstan become an easy prey of Turkey’s “imperialist dream”? Could these traditionally Muslim people be soon facing the end of religious tolerance and gender equality, becoming this new old language an easy instrument for the infiltration in the country of fundamentalism (it has already crossed the boarders of Uzbekistan), leading to a gradual deterioration of its rich multicultural relations? The present structure of the language is still very fragile: there are three main dialects and many academics defend the re-introduction of the Latin alphabet, thus enlarging the possibility of cultural “contamination” by making the transmission of fundamentalist ideas still easier through neighbour countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan (their languages belong to the same sub-group of Common Turkic), where the Latin alphabet is already in use, and where the ground for such ideas shown itself very fruitful. 4. “Construction of Womanhood in the Bengali Language of Bangladesh”, Raasheed Mahmood; University of New South Wales, Sydney. The present essay attempts to explore the role of gender-based language differences and of certain markers that reveal the status accorded to women in Bangladesh. Discrimination against women, in its various forms, is endemic in communities and countries around the world, cutting across class, race, age, and religious and national boundaries. One cannot understand the problems of gender discrimination solely by referring to the relationship of power or authority between men and women. Rather one needs to consider the problem by relating it to the specific social formation in which the image of masculinity and femininity is constructed and reconstructed. Following such line of reasoning this essay will examine the nature of gender bias in the Bengali language of Bangladesh, holding the conviction that as a product of social reality language reflects the socio-cultural behaviour of the community who speaks it. This essay will also attempt to shed some light on the processes through which gender based language differences produce actual consequences for women, who become exposed to low self-esteem, depression and systematic exclusion from public discourse. 5. “Marriage in China as an expression of a changing society”, Elisabetta Rosado David, University of Porto, Portugal, and Università Ca’Foscari, Venezia, Italy. In 29 April 2001, the new Marriage Law was promulgated in China. The first law on marriage was proclaimed in 1950 with the objective of freeing women from the feudal matrimonial system. With the second law, in 1981, values and conditions that had been distorted by the Cultural Revolution were recovered. Twenty years later, a new reform was started, intending to update marriage in the view of the social and cultural changes that occurred with Deng Xiaoping’s “open policy”. But the legal reform is only the starting point for this case-study. The rituals that are followed in the wedding ceremony are often hard to understand and very difficult to standardize, especially because China is a vast country, densely populated and characterized by several ethnic minorities. Two key words emerge from this issue: syncretism and continuity. On this basis, we can understand tradition in a better way, and analyse whether or not marriage, as every social manifestation, has evolved in harmony with Chinese culture. 6. “The Other Woman in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Case of Portuguese India”, Maria de Deus Manso, University of Évora, Portugal. This essay researches the social, cultural and symbolic history of local women in the Portuguese Indian colonial enclaves. The normative Portuguese overseas history has not paid any attention to the “indigenous” female populations in colonial Portuguese territories, albeit the large social importance of these social segments largely used in matrimonial and even catholic missionary strategies. The first attempt to open fresh windows in the history of this new field was the publication of Charles Boxer’s referential study about Women in lberian Overseas Expansion, edited in Portugal only after the Revolution of 1975. After this research we can only quote some other fragmentary efforts. In fact, research about the social, cultural, religious, political and symbolic situation of women in the Portuguese colonial territories, from the XVI to the XX century, is still a minor historiographic field. In this essay we discuss this problem and we study colonial representations of women in the Portuguese Indian enclaves, mainly in the territory of Goa, using case studies methodologies. 7. “Heading East this Time: Critical Readings on Gender in Southeast Asia”, Clara Sarmento, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. This essay intends to discuss some critical readings of fictional and theoretical texts on gender condition in Southeast Asian countries. Nowadays, many texts about women in Southeast Asia apply concepts of power in unusual areas. Traditional forms of gender hegemony have been replaced by other powerful, if somewhat more covert, forms. We will discuss some universal values concerning conventional female roles as well as the strategies used to recognize women in political fields traditionally characterized by male dominance. Female empowerment will mean different things at different times in history, as a result of culture, local geography and individual circumstances. Empowerment needs to be perceived as an individual attitude, but it also has to be facilitated at the macro­level by society and the State. Gender is very much at the heart of all these dynamics, strongly related to specificities of historical, cultural, ethnic and class situatedness, requiring an interdisciplinary transnational approach.

International mobility in the Pharmacy degree at the school of allied health sciences of Oporto

Background: The Erasmus program is a subprogram of the Lifelong Learning program, exclusive for Higher Education that promotes (among other initiatives), the mobility of students(studies, training or internships). The mobility of students of higher education seeks to improve the quality and development of future professionals, providing a multidisciplinary and multicultural experience. Setting: Academic Pharmacy/Pharmacy Technicians Methods: We conducted a descriptive and transversal study on the implementation of the mobility program and analyze the results, which involved applying a survey to students. Results: Since 2009/2010, the Pharmacy Degree at ESTSP has established 7 SMs protocols resulting in an average mobility of 5 students IN and 7 Students OUT. We have also endeavoured in SMp Protocols for extracurricular training with an average of 3 students OUT. The application process is normally open during the year before the mobility period. For most of the students involved, this was a first time opportunity to be in a foreign country and more than 70% choose the mobility program because it is seen as a possibility to improve their curriculum, for personal development or even to pursue employment opportunities abroad. The mobility for teachers is also encouraged. Conclusions: The exchange of experiences and training, acquired during cooperation activities should be an element of continuous dynamics and institutional affirmation. Initiatives such as the ERASMUS Program contribute to the educational and scientific enrichment, and promote international competitiveness among Higher Education Institutions.

ß-lactamases in the biochemistry and molecular biology laboratory

β-lactamases are hydrolytic enzymes that inactivate the β-lactam ring of antibiotics such as penicillins and cephalosporins. The major diversity of studies carried out until now have mainly focused on the characterization of β-lactamases recovered among clinical isolates of Gram-positive staphylococci and Gram-negative enterobacteria, amongst others. However, only some studies refer to the detection and development of β-lactamases carriers in healthy humans, sick animals, or even in strains isolated from environmental stocks such as food, water, or soils. Considering this, we proposed a 10-week laboratory programme for the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology laboratory for majors in the health, environmental, and agronomical sciences. During those weeks, students would be dealing with some basic techniques such as DNA extraction, bacterial transformation, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), gel electrophoresis, and the use of several bioinformatics tools. These laboratory exercises would be conducted as a mini research project in which all the classes would be connected with the previous ones. This curriculum was compared in an experiment involving two groups of students from two different majors. The new curriculum, with classes linked together as a mini research project, was taught to a major in Pharmacy and an old curriculum was taught to students from environmental health. The results showed that students who were enrolled in the new curriculum obtained better results in the final exam than the students who were enrolled in the former curriculum. Likewise, these students were found to be more enthusiastic during the laboratory classes than those from the former curriculum.

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.

A New Approach in the Design of Air Stripping Columns for the Treatment of Groundwater Contaminated With Volatile Organic Compounds

Volatile organic compounds are a common source of groundwater contamination that can be easily removed by air stripping in columns with random packing and using a counter-current flow between the phases. This work proposes a new methodology for column design for any type of packing and contaminant which avoids the necessity of an arbitrary chosen diameter. It also avoids the employment of the usual graphical Eckert correlations for pressure drop. The hydraulic features are previously chosen as a project criterion. The design procedure was translated into a convenient algorithm in C++ language. A column was built in order to test the design, the theoretical steady-state and dynamic behaviour. The experiments were conducted using a solution of chloroform in distilled water. The results allowed for a correction in the theoretical global mass transfer coefficient previously estimated by the Onda correlations, which depend on several parameters that are not easy to control in experiments. For best describe the column behaviour in stationary and dynamic conditions, an original mathematical model was developed. It consists in a system of two partial non linear differential equations (distributed parameters). Nevertheless, when flows are steady, the system became linear, although there is not an evident solution in analytical terms. In steady state the resulting ODE can be solved by analytical methods, and in dynamic state the discretization of the PDE by finite differences allows for the overcoming of this difficulty. To estimate the contaminant concentrations in both phases in the column, a numerical algorithm was used. The high number of resulting algebraic equations and the impossibility of generating a recursive procedure did not allow the construction of a generalized programme. But an iterative procedure developed in an electronic worksheet allowed for the simulation. The solution is stable only for similar discretizations values. If different values for time/space discretization parameters are used, the solution easily becomes unstable. The system dynamic behaviour was simulated for the common liquid phase perturbations: step, impulse, rectangular pulse and sinusoidal. The final results do not configure strange or non-predictable behaviours.

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.

Digital storytelling: an integrated approach to language for the 21st century student

Societal changes have, throughout history, pushed the long-established boundaries of education across all grade levels. Technology and media merge with education in a continuous complex social process with human consequences and effects. We, teachers, can aspire to understand and interpret this volatile context that is being redesigned at the same time society itself is being reshaped as a result of the technological evolution. The language- learning classroom is not impenetrable to these transformations. Rather, it can perhaps be seen as a playground where teachers and students gather to combine the past and the present in an integrated approach. We draw on the results from a previous study and argue that Digital Storytelling as a Process is capable of aggregating and fostering positive student development in general, as well as enhancing interpersonal relationships and self-knowledge while improving digital literacy. Additionally, we establish a link between the four basic language-learning skills and the Digital Storytelling process and demonstrate how these converge into what can be labeled as an integrated language learning approach.

Real-Time Support in the Proposal for Fine-Grained Parallelism in Ada

Presented at Work in Progress Session, IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2015). 1 to 3, Dec, 2015. San Antonio, U.S.A..

Real-Time Support in the Proposal for Fine-Grained Parallelism in Ada

Presented at Work in Progress Session, IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2015). 1 to 3, Dec, 2015. San Antonio, U.S.A..