Arlette Laguiller:does the mainstay of the French political far-left enjoy linguistic parity with her male counterparts?

While language use has been argued to reflect gender asymmetry, increasing parity has been evidenced in official settings (Holmes, 2000; Dister and Moreau, 2006). Our hypothesis is that the French national press has developed a norm of equal linguistic treatment of men and women. In a corpus of articles from Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro, we examine the treatment of Arlette Laguiller, the female leader of the French extreme-left 'Worker's Struggle' Party (Lutte Ouvrière), during the run-up to the 2007 presidential elections. How Laguiller is referred to and described in comparison with her male counterparts evidences no asymmetry. Breaches to parity are only found in the right-wing Figaro newspaper. The ideological distance between the newspaper and the candidate suggests that power struggles are a primary source of asymmetrical treatments. The discursive functions of such treatments can be understood through an investigation based on a portable corpus linguistics methodology for the measure of discrimination. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Making a difference:critical linguistic analysis in a legal context

One of the major problems for Critical Discourse Analysts is how to move on from their insightful critical analyses to successfully 'acting on the world in order to transform it'. This paper discusses, with detailed exemplification, some of the areas where linguists have moved beyond description to acting on and changing the world. Examples from three murder trials show how essential it is, in order to protect the rights of witnesses and defendants, to have audio records of significant interviews with police officers. The article moves on to discuss the potentially serious consequences of the many communicative problems inherent in legal/lay interaction and illustrates a few of the linguist-led improvements to important texts. Finally, the article turns to the problems of using linguistic data to try to determine the geographical origin of asylum seekers. The intention of the article is to act as a call to arms to linguists; it concludes with the observation that 'innumerable mountains remain for those with a critical linguistic perspective who would like to try to move one'. © 2011 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Adversarial interpreting – a forensic linguistic perspective

Interactions with second language speakers in public service contexts in England are normally conducted with the assistance of one interpreter. Even in situations where team interpreting would be advisable, for example in lengthy courtroom proceedings, financial considerations mean only one interpreter is normally booked. On occasion, however, more than one interpreter, or an individual (or individuals) with knowledge of the languages in question, may be simultaneously present during an interpreted interaction, either monitoring it or indeed volunteering unsolicited input. During police interviews or trials in England this may happen when the interpreter secured by the defence team to interpret during private consultation with the suspect or defendant is present also in the interview room or the courtroom but two independently sourced interpreters need not be limited to legal contexts. In healthcare settings for example, service users sometimes bring friends or relatives along to help them communicate with service providers only to find that the latter have booked an interpreter as a matter of procedure. By analogy to the nature of the English legal system, I refer to contexts where an interpreter’s output is monitored and/or challenged, either during the speech event or subsequently, as ‘adversarial interpreting’. This conceptualisation reflects the fact that interpreters in such encounters are sourced independently, often by opposing parties, and as a result can rarely be considered a team. My main concern in this paper is to throw spotlight on adversarial interpreting as a hitherto rarely discussed problem in its own right. That it is not an anomaly is evidenced by the many cases around the world where the officially recorded interpreted output was challenged, as mentioned in for example Berk-Seligson (2002), Hayes and Hale (2010), and Phelan (2011). This paper reports on the second stage of a research project which has previously involved the analysis of a transcript of an interpreted police interview with a suspect in a murder case. I will mention the findings of the analysis briefly and introduce some new findings based on input from practising interpreters who have shared their experience of adversarial interpreting by completing an online questionnaire. I will try to answer the question of how the presence of two interpreters, or an interpreter and a monitoring participant, in the same speech event impacts on the communication process. I will also address the issue of forensic linguistic arbitration in cases where incompetent interpreting has been identified or an expert opinion is sought in relation to an adversarial interpreting event of significance to a legal dispute. References Berk-Seligson (2002), The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process, University of Chicago Press. Hayes, A. and Hale, S. (2010), "Appeals on incompetent interpreting", Journal of Judicial Administration 20.2, 119-130. Phelan, M. (2011), "Legal Interpreters in the news in Ireland", Translation and Interpreting 3.1, 76-105.

Costs and benefits of orthographic inconsistency in reading:evidence from a cross-linguistic comparison

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences.

A European competence framework for industrial pharmacy practice in biotechnology

Project Report: The PHAR-IN ("Competences for industrial pharmacy practice in biotechnology") looked at whether there is a difference in how industrial employees and academics rank competences for practice in the biotechnological industry. A small expert panel consisting of the authors of this paper produced a biotechnology competence framework by drawing up an initial list of competences then ranking them in importance using a three-stage Delphi process. The framework was next evaluated and validated by a large expert panel of academics (n = 37) and industrial employees (n = 154). Results show that priorities for industrial employees and academics were similar. The competences for biotechnology practice that received the highest scores were mainly in: . "Research and Development", . "Upstream" and "Downstream" Processing', " . "Product development and formulation", " . "Aseptic processing", ."Analytical methodology", . "Product stability", and . "Regulation". The main area of disagreement was in the category "Ethics and drug safety" where academics ranked competences higher than did industrial employees.

A földrajzi távolság, a kulturális hasonlóság és a szabadkereskedelem hatása a borkereskedelemre = Effects on the global wine trade of geographical distance, cultural and linguistic similarity, and free trade

A globalizálódó világgazdaságban a vezető bortermelő országok egyre jelentősebb borkereskedelmet bonyolítanak le egymás között. Míg Európában a fogyasztók egyre kevesebb bort vásárolnak, addig Amerikában és Ázsiában a bor iránti kereslet folyamatosan bővül: a borkereskedelem földrajzi átrendeződése zajlik. A kulturális hasonlóság és a földrajzi távolság kereskedelemre gyakorolt hatását gyakran a kereskedelemelméletek gravitációs modelljével elemzik. E tanulmány azt vizsgálja, hogy a fő borexportáló országok közötti földrajzi távolság, kulturális hasonlóság és szabadkereskedelem milyen hatással van a nemzetközi borkereskedelemre, annak költségeire. A regressziós becslés eredményei alátámasztják, hogy a borkereskedelem költségei alacsonyabbak, ha a kereskedelmi partnerek kulturálisan hasonlók, földrajzilag közel helyezkednek el egymáshoz, vagy van tengeri kikötőjük, tagjai a WTO-nak, illetve ha kötöttek egymással regionális kereskedelmi megállapodást. Ezenkívül megállapítható, hogy az angolszász, a latin-amerikai és az európai kulturális klaszterek elsősorban egymással kereskednek. A kutatás számos kulturális változó alkalmazásával és több ökonometriai modell, illetve becslési eljárás nagymintás tesztelésével gazdagítja a szakirodalmat. ____ In a globalizing world, major wine-producing countries export considerable quantities to the global wine market and turn over a notable trade, but in what happens European wine regions differ markedly from the New World. Here major wine producers suffered a remarkable fall in domestic wine consumption in recent decades, while New World wine producers increased their production potential and generated new foreign demand. The changes have been joined by geographical relocation of wine consumption and exports. The gravity equation can be derived from demand-side or supply-side theory-consistent estimation methods that suggest relationships between the size of the economies, geographical distances, cultural similarities, and size of their trade. The paper analyses the effects of cultural and geographical proximity, free trade, and linguistic similarity on bilateral trade in the main wine-producing countries, using a cross-section gravity model for 2012. The results suggest that larger countries export more wine, while transport costs rise in line with geographical distance and are higher for landlocked trading partners. Wine export costs are lower if trading partners are culturally similar, share a dominant religion, or are both WTO members with regional trade agreements. Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Latin American and Latin European countries mainly trade wines within their groups. The paper looks to extend the number of trading partners, investigate the effect of language clusters, and confirm that the results are robust by different econometric methodologies.

An investigation into factors that influence the sense of competence of six high school girls

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of environment, behavior, capabilities, beliefs and values, and identity, based on Dilts' (1990) levels of cognitive alignment, on the cognitive construct of sense of competence and related constructs of self-efficacy, motivation, expectations, and goal-setting among adolescent girls. An individual who is aligned is free from conflict among the interaction of these levels. In addition, academic achievement, adolescent culture, parental involvement, and school environment were four of several issues in the lives of adolescent girls examined to explore how these issues might interact with the levels of alignment and sense of competence.^ A case study approach used in-depth interviews with six female seniors from private single-sex and mixed-sex high schools organized around the levels of alignment and school environment. Response patterns were analyzed to determine each girl's varying evidence of alignment or freedom from conflict within her environment.^ The findings indicated that none of the girls were able to meet the conditions for alignment in Dilts' model or a sense of competence. School environment, parental involvement, and adolescent culture were important factors influencing the extent to which conflict was experienced by each girl. The girls with domain-specific successes developed strategies that concentrated their efforts in the domains in which they could demonstrate their best abilities. The results contribute to current theory and research on adolescent girls: and have value for practitioners working with adolescent girls in developing strategies to improve their self-efficacy, motivation, expectations, goal-setting, and overall sense of competence. ^

Salient factors in child molestation: Moral development, social competence, and type of offender

The current study was designed to build on and extend the existing knowledge base of factors that cause, maintain, and influence child molestation. Theorized links among the type of offender and the offender's levels of moral development and social competence in the perpetration of child molestation were investigated. The conceptual framework for the study is based on the cognitive developmental stages of moral development as proposed by Kohlberg, the unified theory, or Four-Preconditions Model, of child molestation as proposed by Finkelhor, and the Information-Processing Model of Social Skills as proposed by McFall. The study sample consisted of 127 adult male child molesters participating in outpatient group therapy. All subjects completed a Self-Report Questionnaire which included questions designed to obtain relevant demographic data, questions similar to those used by the researchers for the Massachusetts Treatment Center: Child Molester Typology 3's social competency dimension, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) short form, the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SADS), the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule (RAS), and the Questionnaire Measure of Empathic Tendency (Empathy Scale). Data were analyzed utilizing confirmatory factor analysis, t-tests, and chi-square statistics. Partial support was found for the hypothesis that moral development is a separate but correlated construct from social competence. As predicted, although the actual mean score differences were small, a statistically significant difference was found in the current study between the mean DITP scores of the subject sample and that of the general male population, suggesting that child molesters, as a group, function at a lower level of moral development than does the general male population, and the situational offenders in the study sample demonstrated a statistically significantly higher level of moral development than the preferential offenders. The data did not support the hypothesis that situational offenders will demonstrate lower levels of social competence than preferential offenders. Relatively little significance is placed on this finding, however, because the measure for the social competency variable was likely subject to considerable measurement error in that the items used as indicators were not clearly defined. The last hypothesis, which involved the potential differences in social anxiety, assertion skills, and empathy between the situational and preferential offender types, was not supported by the data. ^

The role of the health care organization in supporting nurses in the delivery of culturally competent care

This study was designed to explore ways in which health care organizations (HCOs) can support nurses in their delivery of culturally competent care. While cultural competence has become a priority for the federal government as well as the major health professional organizations, its integration into care delivery has not yet been realized. Health professionals cite a lack of educational preparation, time, and organizational resources as barriers. Most experts in the field agree that the cultural and linguistic needs of ethnic minorities pose challenges that individual care providers are unable to manage without the support of the health care organizations within which they practice. While several studies have identified implications for HCOs, there is a paucity of research on their role in this aspect of care delivery. Using a qualitative design with a case study approach, data collection included face-to-face interviews with 23 registered nurses, document analysis, and reports of critical incidents. The site chosen was a large health care system in South Florida that serves a culturally diverse population. Major findings from the study included language barriers, lack of training, difficulty with cultural differences, lack of organizational support, and reliance on culturally diverse staff members. Most nurses thought the ethnic mix was adequate, but rated other supports such as language services, training, and patient education materials as inadequate. Some of the recommendations for organizational performance were to provide the expectations and support for culturally competent care. Implications and recommendations for practice include nurses using trained interpreters instead of relying on coworkers or trying to "wing it", pursuing training, and advocating for organizational supports for culturally competent care. Implications and recommendations for theory included a blended model that combines both models in the conceptual framework. Recommendations for future research were for studies on the impact of language bathers on care delivery, develop and test a quantitative instrument, and to incorporate Gilbert's model into nursing research.

Professional Ethics and Welfare Reform: The Importance of Ethical Competence

This paper explores the professional ethics of welfare reform providers and its influence in the achievement of welfare reform goals. Four themes address the professional ethics and ethical competence of welfare reform providers.

Intercultural Education and Intercultural Competence in Higher Education in Ukraine

The establishment of independent Ukraine in 1991 created a political and social climate that entailed a need and possibility for democratic educational reforms in Ukraine. An integration of Ukraine in multicultural European and global society can be supported academically by infusing intercultural education in primary, secondary, and higher education curricula.