Probabilistic Envelope Curves for Extreme Rainfall Events - Curve Inviluppo Probabilistiche per Precipitazioni Estreme

A regional envelope curve (REC) of flood flows summarises the current bound on our experience of extreme floods in a region. RECs are available for most regions of the world. Recent scientific papers introduced a probabilistic interpretation of these curves and formulated an empirical estimator of the recurrence interval T associated with a REC, which, in principle, enables us to use RECs for design purposes in ungauged basins. The main aim of this work is twofold. First, it extends the REC concept to extreme rainstorm events by introducing the Depth-Duration Envelope Curves (DDEC), which are defined as the regional upper bound on all the record rainfall depths at present for various rainfall duration. Second, it adapts the probabilistic interpretation proposed for RECs to DDECs and it assesses the suitability of these curves for estimating the T-year rainfall event associated with a given duration and large T values. Probabilistic DDECs are complementary to regional frequency analysis of rainstorms and their utilization in combination with a suitable rainfall-runoff model can provide useful indications on the magnitude of extreme floods for gauged and ungauged basins. The study focuses on two different national datasets, the peak over threshold (POT) series of rainfall depths with duration 30 min., 1, 3, 9 and 24 hrs. obtained for 700 Austrian raingauges and the Annual Maximum Series (AMS) of rainfall depths with duration spanning from 5 min. to 24 hrs. collected at 220 raingauges located in northern-central Italy. The estimation of the recurrence interval of DDEC requires the quantification of the equivalent number of independent data which, in turn, is a function of the cross-correlation among sequences. While the quantification and modelling of intersite dependence is a straightforward task for AMS series, it may be cumbersome for POT series. This paper proposes a possible approach to address this problem.

Internazionalizzazione e traduzione: Un'esperienza presso l'azienda TR Turoni S.R.L.

This dissertation was conducted within the project Language Toolkit, which has the aim of integrating the worlds of work and university. In particular, it consists of the translation into English of documents commissioned by the Italian company TR Turoni and its primary purpose is to demonstrate that, in the field of translation for companies, the existing translation support tools and software can optimise and facilitate the translation process. The work consists of five chapters. The first introduces the Language Toolkit project, the TR Turoni company and its relationship with the CERMAC export consortium. After outlining the current state of company internationalisation, the importance of professional translators in enhancing the competitiveness of companies that enter new international markets is highlighted. Chapter two provides an overview of the texts to be translated, focusing on the textual function and typology and on the addressees. After that, manual translation and the main software developed specifically for translators are described, with a focus on computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT). The third chapter presents the target texts and the corresponding translations. Chapter four is dedicated to the analysis of the translation process. The first two texts were translated manually, with the support of a purpose-built specialized corpus. The following two documents were translated with the software SDL Trados Studio 2011 and its applications. The last texts were submitted to the Google Translate service and to a process of pre and post-editing. Finally, in chapter five conclusions are drawn about the main limits and potentialities of the different translations techniques. In addition to this, the importance of an integrated use of all available instruments is underlined.

Le collocazioni in traduzione e interpretazione tra italiano e francese: Uno studio su eptic_01_2011

This dissertation aims at investigating differences in phraseological patterns in translated and interpreted language, on the basis of the intermodal corpus EPTIC_01_2011 and focusing on Italian and French. First of all, an overview is offered of the main studies and theories about corpus linguistics and collocations: the notion of corpus is defined and a typology (focusing on intermodal corpora) is presented, before moving on to the linguistic phenomenon of collocation and its investigation through corpus linguistics methods. Second, the general structure of EPTIC_01_2011 is presented, including the ways in which its texts have been assembled, edited through ad hoc conventions and enriched with metadata. The methodology proposed by Durrant and Schmitt (2009), slightly edited to fit the present study, has been used to extract and compare noun+adjective/adjective+noun bigrams from a quantitative point of view. A subset of these data have then been extracted and analysed manually. The results of the study are presented through graphs and examples, with an in-depth discussion of the bigrams considered. Lastly, the data collected are analysed and categorised in terms of shifts occurring in translation and in interpreting, potential causes are discussed and ideas for further research and for the development of the EPTIC corpus are sketched.

Financing university spin-outs: evidence from Imperial College London

This research work focuses on the factors which lead investors to finance university spin-outs. The achieved results related to spin-out companies in the United Kingdom are based on empirical evidence from Imperial College London. The characteristics of a sample of 557 university spin-outs have been examined in order to understand the investors’ attitude towards financing this typology of companies. The outputs of this study demonstrate that official spin-out companies supported by Imperial College are more likely to receive an investment. Furthermore, it is also shown that investors are not inclined to finance academic spin-outs in which the board of directors includes academics who are mainly involved in researching and teaching activities.