Swiss multidisciplinary and multilingual experience of the Advanced Trauma Life Support course: lessons for Europe

Courses in the Advanced Trauma Life Support are a well-accepted concept throughout the world for training in the emergency treatment of polytraumatized patients. Switzerland, a multilingual country with a long tradition of multidisciplinary collaboration in trauma care, introduced its first student courses in 1998. Unlike some countries where the courses are attended only by surgeons, instructors and students in Switzerland include surgeons, anaesthetists and physicians from other specialties.

A multilingual audiometer simulator software for training purposes

A set of algorithms, which allows a computer to determine the answers of simulated patients during pure tone and speech audiometry, is presented. Based on these algorithms, a computer program for training in audiometry was written and found to be useful for teaching purposes.

Interview and translation strategies: coping with multilingual settings and data

Central Eastern Europe, the research area this paper is concerned with, is a region characterized by a high diversity of languages and cultures. It is, at the same time, an area where political, cultural and social conflicts have emerged over time, nowadays especially in border zones, where people of different ethnic, cultural or linguistic background live. In this context, it is important for us researchers to get balanced interview data, and consequently we very often have to conduct interviews in several different languages and within changing cultural contexts. In order to avoid "communication problems" or even conflictual (interview) situations, which might damage the outcome of the research, we are thus challenged to find appropriate communication strategies for any of these situations. This is especially difficult when we are confronted with language or culture-specific terminology or taboo expressions that carry political meaning(s). Once the interview data is collected and it comes to translating and analysing it, we face further challenges and new questions arise. First of all, we have to decide what a good translation strategy would be. Many words and phrases that exist in one language do not have an exact equivalent in another. Therefore we have to find a solution for translating these expressions and concepts in a way that their meanings do not get "lost by translation". In this paper I discuss and provide insights to these challenges by presenting and discussing numerous examples from the region in question. Specifically, I focus on the deconstruction of the meaning of geographical names and politically loaded expressions in order to show the sensitivities of language, the difficulties of research in multilingual settings and with multilingual data as well as the strategies or "ways out" of certain dilemmas.

Multilingualism and age:The consequences of retirement on multilingual competence

OBJECTIVES: The research question for this project mainly concentrates on the sociolinguistic aspects of a socalled “language related major life event” (De Bot, 2007): retirement. “Language related major life events” are events in the lifespan that are important for changes happening in the linguistic setting which influence the language development. In my paper I will explore changes happening around retirement in regard to multilingual competence. The focus will be on two groups: Italian migrants living in the city of Berne and Swissgerman-speakers, both at the age around retirement. The above mentioned changes can take place on two levels. (1) On the one hand, people have more time for curricular activities after retirement, which they can use in order to learn new languages or to improve their language skills. In this case we are dealing with the concept of “lifelong learning”. (2) On the other hand, language competence can be lost due to the (partial) loss of the retiree’s social network at their former workplace. METHODS: I will first examine these processes by using quantitative questionnaires in order to obtain general information on demographic data, the social situation, and a self-assessment of linguistic skills. Secondly, I will use qualitative interviews to gain in-depth information on the linguistic changes happening around retirement and their link to different factors, such as social networks, education, gender or the language biography. RESULTS: Since the project is still in its early stages of development, clear results can’t be mentioned yet. By May 2012 I will be able to present results of the quantitative study as well as a first glance into the results of the qualitative part of the project. CONCLUSION: The results of this project are meant to benefit the better insight into different aspects that haven’t been looked at in detail till this point. (1) What is the general and linguistic situation of Italian migrants who decided to remain in Switzerland after retirement and how can their linguistic skills affect their quality of living? (2) Who decides to learn a new language after retirement and how should language courses for older people be designed?

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora

Discourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank.