The other on display: translation in the Ethnographic Museum

The ethnographic museum in the West has a long and troubling history. The display of 'exotic peoples' in travelling exhibitions began as early as the sixteenth century, but it was the mid and late nineteenth century that saw the great expansion of museums as sites to show artefacts collected - under anything but reputable circumstances - from what were considered the 'primitive', 'natural', or 'tribal' peoples of the world. Today the ethnographic museum is still a feature of large European cities, though faced with newly formulated dilemmas in the postcolonial world. For how can the material culture of a non-western people be collected and displayed in the West without its makers being translated into wordless and powerless objects of visual consumption? In national museums the processes of choosing, contextualizing and commentating exhibits help form national identity; in the ethnographic museum, similarly, they shape perceptions of the apparently distant Other. Like written ethnography, the museum is a 'translation of culture', with many of the associated problems traced by Talal Asad (1986). Like the written form, it has to represent the dialogic realities of cultural encounters in a fixed and intelligible form, to propose categories that define and order the material it has gathered. As the public face of academic ethnography, the museum interprets other cultures for the benefit of the general reader, and in that task museum practice, like all ethnography, operates within very specific historical and political parameters. How are museums in western Europe responding to the issues raised by critical ethnographers like James Clifford (1988), with their focus on the politics of representation? Is globalisation increasing the degree of accountability imposed on the ethnographic museum, or merely reinforcing older patterns? What opportunities and problems are raised by the use of more words - more 'translation' in the narrower sense - in ethnographic museums, and how do museums gain from introducing a reflexive and contextualizing concept of "thick translation" (Appiah 1993) into their work of interpretation?

Experimental and theoretical characterisation of tunable fibre gratings

This thesis presents details on both theoretical and experimental aspects of UV written fibre gratings. The main body of the thesis deals with the design, fabrication and testing of telecommunication optical fibre grating devices, but also an accurate theoretical analysis of intra-core fibre gratings is presented. Since more than a decade, fibre gratings have been extensively used in the telecommunication field (as filters, dispersion compensators, and add/drop multiplexers for instance). Gratings for telecommunication should conform to very high fabrication standards as the presence of any imperfection raises the noise level in the transmission system compromising its ability of transmitting intelligible sequence of bits to the receiver. Strong side lobes suppression and high and sharp reflection profile are then necessary characteristics. A fundamental part of the theoretical and experimental work reported in this thesis is about apodisation. The physical principle of apodisation is introduced and a number of apodisation techniques, experimental results and numerical optimisation of the shading functions and all the practical parameters involved in the fabrication are detailed. The measurement of chromatic dispersion in fibres and FBGs is detailed and an estimation of its accuracy is given. An overview on the possible methods that can be implemented for the fabrication of tunable fibre gratings is given before detailing a new dispersion compensator device based on the action of a distributed strain onto a linearly chirped FBG. It is shown that tuning of second and third order dispersion of the grating can be obtained by the use of a specially designed multipoint bending rig. Experiments on the recompression of optical pulses travelling long distances are detailed for 10 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s. The characterisation of a new kind of double section LPG fabricated on a metal-clad coated fibre is reported. The fabrication of the device is made easier by directly writing the grating through the metal coating. This device may be used to overcome the recoating problems associated with standard LPGs written in step-index fibre. Also, it can be used as a sensor for simultaneous measurements of temperature and surrounding medium refractive index.

The intelligibility of noise-vocoded speech:spectral information available from across-channel comparison of amplitude envelopes

Noise-vocoded (NV) speech is often regarded as conveying phonetic information primarily through temporal-envelope cues rather than spectral cues. However, listeners may infer the formant frequencies in the vocal-tract output—a key source of phonetic detail—from across-band differences in amplitude when speech is processed through a small number of channels. The potential utility of this spectral information was assessed for NV speech created by filtering sentences into six frequency bands, and using the amplitude envelope of each band (=30 Hz) to modulate a matched noise-band carrier (N). Bands were paired, corresponding to F1 (˜N1 + N2), F2 (˜N3 + N4) and the higher formants (F3' ˜ N5 + N6), such that the frequency contour of each formant was implied by variations in relative amplitude between bands within the corresponding pair. Three-formant analogues (F0 = 150 Hz) of the NV stimuli were synthesized using frame-by-frame reconstruction of the frequency and amplitude of each formant. These analogues were less intelligible than the NV stimuli or analogues created using contours extracted from spectrograms of the original sentences, but more intelligible than when the frequency contours were replaced with constant (mean) values. Across-band comparisons of amplitude envelopes in NV speech can provide phonetically important information about the frequency contours of the underlying formants.

Teaching pronunciation:a case for a pedagogy based upon intelligibility

This thesis examines the main aim of teaching pronunciation in second language acquisition in the Syrian context. In other words, it investigates the desirable end point, namely: whether it is native-like accent, or intelligible pronunciation. This thesis also investigates the factors that affect native-like pronunciation and intelligible accent. It also analyses English language teaching methods. The currently used English pronunciation course is examined in detail too. The aim is to find out the learners’ aim of pronunciation, the best teaching method for achieving that aim, and the most appropriate course book that fulfils the aim. In order to find out learners’ aim in pronunciation, a qualitative research is undertaken. The research takes advantage of some aspects of case study. It is also supported by a questionnaire to gather data. The result of this research can be regarded as an attempt to bring the Syrian context to the current trends in the teaching of English pronunciation. The results show that learners are satisfied with intelligible pronunciation. The currently used teaching method (grammar-translation method) may be better replaced by the (communicative approach) which is more appropriate than the currently used method. It is also more effective to change the currently used book to a new one that corresponds to that aim. The current theories and issues in teaching English pronunciation that support learners’ intelligibility will be taken into account in the newly proposed course book.