Distant Languages Research Articles

THE USE OF VIDEO MATERIALS IN FLT: A CASE STUDY AT FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF TNPU

With the increasing use of innovative approaches to foreign languages teaching (FLT), video materials have become more accessible and easier to incorporate into the process of language acquisition. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of online learning, and video materials have become an important tool for distant language teaching. The article deals with theoretical and practical aspects of the usage of video materials in language teaching and learning. In the course of research surveys were made to determine the range of purposes and varieties of the most common uses of video resources. Examples of how technology has been used to support the use of video materials in language teaching and learning have been provided. The potential benefits and challenges of using video materials in language teaching and learning have been outlined. It has been justified that video materials promote language learners’ motivation, influence vocabulary growth providing an efficient and effective way to learn real-life language. The most common ways of the applying of video materials for individual work have been considered such as listening and comprehension practice; vocabulary building; grammar practice; pronunciation practice, cultural immersion; independent research and collaborative projects

Accuracy and Problems of Machine-Based Translation in Contrast to Human-Based Translation when Rendering Health Awareness Texts Versus Poetry Texts

The aim of this article is to examine the accuracy of machine-based translation in contrast to human-based translation from Arabic into English only and not vice-versa. Through their own experiments, the authors compared the findings to findings of some other researchers in this field. The article deals with machine-based translation between these two distant languages in the context of different types of topics, mainly medical language (Health Awareness Texts) as a scientific translation publicly published texts, and literature language (Ancient Arabic Poetry Stanzas) as a literary translation non-publicly published texts according to the authors’ experiments and data analysis. The data of the first type group were collected from various materials used in translation projects at King Fahad Hospital of Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University while the second type data were selected from an article previously published by the first author but not available publicly or translated. Per the methodology, the authors used words errors rate equation (WER) after the translation has been thoroughly investigated by two external professional translators. The results of the study show that machine-based translation has its advantages but still does not totally replace human role in translating from Arabic to English because the outcome still requires deep editing.
 
 Received: 10 March 2023 / Accepted: 16 June 2023 / Published: 5 July 2023

Nouns are not always processed faster than verbs in bilingual speakers: effects of language distance

AbstractThe purpose of the current report is to study the effects of language distance on noun and verb processing in bilingual speakers. We recruited two groups of bilingual speakers: one group spoke two typologically distant languages (Cantonese and English) and the other group spoke two typologically similar languages (Mandarin and Cantonese). Participants named object and action pictures in their first language. We controlled psycholinguistic properties of words such as frequency, AoA, imageability, name agreement, visual complexity, familiarity, and participants’ bilingual language experiences. Our findings revealed a significant role for language distance. We observed a difference between noun and verb processing in the similar language pair (Mandarin–Cantonese) due to interference induced by language similarity. However, in the distant language pair (Cantonese–English), the difference disappeared because of the lack of cross-language interference. Our findings support that current and future models of bilingual language processing should take into account the effects of language distance.

Differences in Heterogeneous Returns to Foreign Language Use at Work Among Natives and Migrants in Europe

The cultural-demographic profile of Europe has been heavily influenced by migration dynamics over the past decades. The question is whether language diversity in a host country – in particular, language proficiency and foreign language use at work – has implications for the workers’ wages. Our study examines the heterogeneous impacts of foreign language use at work on earnings of both native-born workers and foreign-born workers. To that end, a Mincer earnings equation is specified. The model is tested by means of an extensive data set that captures all relevant variables. Despite the dated nature of the data used, several interesting outcomes on wage differentials in Europe – as a result of foreign language use at work – are found. First, for native-born workers with a tertiary diploma, using a foreign language at work is found to have an unambiguously positive impact on their earnings (2%). Second, for foreign-born workers, returns to foreign language use at work is highly complementary to education. Foreign language users below the upper secondary educational level earn significantly less (−8%) than those who use the local language at work. Third, a linguistically distant foreign language gives native-born workers the highest wage premium, while the use of EU official languages pays off the most for foreign-born workers. Fourth, our results do not show evidence that the lack of local language knowledge of low-educated migrants causes these results, as immigrants for whom the mother tongue is similar to the local language show similar outcome.

PECULIARITIES OF THAT FLEXIBILITY OF THE GERMAN-UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION OF RELIGIOUS VOCABULARY

Objective. The objective of the article is to investigate the main translation strategies of structurally distant languages, namely the religious vocabulary of the German language, as well as to analyze the peculiarities and complexities of its German-Ukrainian translation. Methods. Solving the set tasks is carried out using such methods as analysis and generalization of scientific literature on the problems of translation studies; system and comparative analysis, and the continuous sampling technique is applied to collect language facts. Results. Studying the peculiarities and difficulties that arise in the process of translation from German to Ukrainian, and especially when working with religious vocabulary, it should be noted that a literal translation will often be incomprehensible due to the absence or lack of knowledge of one or another feature of German culture. Therefore, in order to avoid questions and misunderstandings, the translator must find an equivalent word, metaphor, proverb or saying, or a story that will evoke the same feelings and thoughts that the recipient receives when reading the original text. Issues of the importance of context and the peculiarities of German grammar also affect the quality of the translation. Therefore, the difference between German and Ukrainian culture, as well as religions, requires special skills of the translator and mastery of various translation tools. Phrases with a religious component, religious terms create additional difficulties in the process of translation, because sometimes it is very difficult to find an equivalent in the Ukrainian language, so a comprehensive translation is the best choice in this case. Having analyzed a number of religious terms from Duden explanatory dictionary, it can be concluded that the influence of the Latin language over the centuries on other languages caused a high number of equivalents of religious concepts in the Ukrainian and German languages. Therefore, in most cases, the selection of a direct analogue and adaptive transcoding is used in the process of translating religious vocabulary.

L2 Polish developmental sequences in an intercomprehension context

Abstract This paper describes the results of a research project aiming to document the acquisition sequence of a set of L2 Polish morphosyntactic structures. In order to verify the hypothesis that acquisition sequences are largely independent of the learner’s L1, data were collected among two groups of learners, i. e. speakers of typologically and genetically distant languages relative to Polish, on the one hand, and speakers of East Slavic languages (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian), on the other hand, all of which are lexically and grammatically very close to the target language. Data were obtained through a survey and an Elicited Imitation Task.While Slavic learners systematically achieved higher performance than their non-Slavic counterparts, the acquisition sequences of the two groups proved to a large extent comparable. These results suggest an interaction between a general processing advantage deriving from a close relation between the L2 and one’s L1, on the one hand, and universal acquisition constraints, on the other hand.

Bilingual word embedding fusion for robust unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction

Great progress has been made in unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (UBLI) by aligning the source and target word embeddings independently trained on monolingual corpora. The common assumption of most UBLI models is that the embedding spaces of two languages are approximately isomorphic (i.e., similar in geometric structure). Therefore, the performance is bound by the degree of isomorphism, especially on etymologically and typologically distant languages. Near-zero UBLI results have been reported for them. To address this problem, we propose a method to increase the isomorphism based on bilingual word embedding fusion. In particular, the features from the source embeddings are integrated into the target embeddings, and vice versa. Therefore, the resulting structures of source and target embeddings are similar to each other. The method does not require any form of supervision and can be applied to any language pair. On a benchmark dataset of bilingual lexicon induction, our approach can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods, with particularly strong results being found on distant languages.

Her Discourse

In the third person, the narrative follows ‘her’ inner speech through the affective events and accidents of a love story, a story that would without her knowing be made into a text, this one, perhaps, or another. Her passionate life is enumerated, catalogued as so many discursive events, some real, concrete, others abstract. A litany of amorous tropes, written down for the record. We have the impression of a text mimicking another, a shadowy sense of the déjà-lu, as if it were translated from a work in a distant language, now lost. Or that lost work translated this one.

Advanced Foreign Language Learners: Prosodic Transition from L1 to L3

This study provides more data from more typologically distant languages and focusing on interrogative sentences. Thus, this research addresses a key gap from previous studies that have only studied prosodic transitions between more typologically close languages. Moreover, this study successfully controls for the background of participants in a more detailed way by setting limitations on participants’ language proficiency and the recency of their language usage. These limitations are necessary since it is difficult to conduct research on prosodic transitions within 3 languages due to the limited number of trilingual participants. Finally, this paper finds that for people who speak second language (L2) and third language (L3) with high proficiency, the influence of phonological characters from L1 will be more prominent than that of L2 on L3 intonational status. This study can be improved, as the amount of data collected is limited. Besides this problem, intonational typology considered in this paper should be reevaluated in further studies.

Periphrastische Diskursmarker im (inner)romanisch-deutschen Sprachvergleich.

Verbal periphrases (VP) constitute a typological feature of Romance languages and they are especially frequent in the Iberoromanic languages. In the context of this paper, the aspectual verbal construction stare a + infinito and the modal VP volere + infinito will be “grasped in the concrete speech action” (Katelhön 2013: 237; my translation) in order to show how these two VPs are used as discourse-structuring elements in contemporary Italian (outline signals, turn-taking markers, hesitation phenomena etc.). Furthermore, formal and functional equivalents of the periphrastic discourse markers it. sta(mmi) a sentire and it. voglio dire will be analyzed in two Romance “sister languages”, namely French and Spanish, as well as in a typologically more distant language, namely German. The translation strategies chosen in the respective target languages will be examined with regard to the preservation or modification of pragmatic-discursive values inherent in the source language structure. For the present study, which is exclusively qualitative, the LIP corpus and the OPUS corpus (Tiedemann 2012, Italian), which is a collection of subtitles from a wide range of films in various languages, were used.

Clustering of Monolingual Embedding Spaces

Suboptimal performance of cross-lingual word embeddings for distant and low-resource languages calls into question the isomorphic assumption integral to the mapping-based methods of obtaining such embeddings. This paper investigates the comparative impact of typological relationship and corpus size on the isomorphism between monolingual embedding spaces. To that end, two clustering algorithms were applied to three sets of pairwise degrees of isomorphisms. It is also the goal of the paper to determine the combination of the isomorphism measure and clustering algorithm that best captures the typological relationship among the chosen set of languages. Of the three measures investigated, Relational Similarity seemed to capture best the typological information of the languages encoded in their respective embedding spaces. These language clusters can help us identify, without any pre-existing knowledge about the real-world linguistic relationships shared among a group of languages, the related higher-resource languages of low-resource languages. The presence of such languages in the cross-lingual embedding space can help improve the performance of low-resource languages in a cross-lingual embedding space.

Connections between spatially distant primary language regions strengthen with age during infancy, as revealed by resting-state fNIRS

Objective. Hearing is an important sensory function that plays a key role in how children learn to speak and develop language skills. Although previous neuroimaging studies have established that much of brain network maturation happens in early childhood, our understanding of the developmental trajectory of language areas is still very limited. We hypothesized that typical development trajectory of language areas in early childhood could be established by analyzing the changes of functional connectivity in normal hearing infants at different ages using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Approach. Resting-state data were recorded from two bilateral temporal and prefrontal regions associated with language processing by measuring the relative changes of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin (HbR) concentrations. Connectivity was calculated using magnitude-squared coherence of channel pairs located in (a) inter-hemispheric homologous and (b) intra-hemispheric brain regions to assess connectivity between homologous regions across hemispheres and two regions of interest in the same hemisphere, respectively. Main results. A linear regression model fitted to the age vs coherence of inter-hemispheric homologous test group revealed a significant coefficient of determination for both HbO (R 2 = 0.216, p = 0.0169) and HbR (R 2 = 0.206, p = 0.0198). A significant coefficient of determination was also found for intra-hemispheric test group for HbO (R 2 = 0.237, p = 0.0117) but not for HbR (R 2 = 0.111, p = 0.0956). Significance. The findings from HbO data suggest that both inter-hemispheric homologous and intra-hemispheric connectivity between primary language regions significantly strengthen with age in the first year of life. Mapping out the developmental trajectory of primary language areas of normal hearing infants as measured by functional connectivity could potentially allow us to better understand the altered connectivity and its effects on language delays in infants with hearing impairments.

Estratégias de transcriação na dublagem de um anúncio humorístico de tipo de texto híbrido para o árabe - Vernacular é a panaceia?

ABSTRACT Adapting advertisements across distant languages and cultures poses challenges due to their heavy cultural context. Complicating matters, some ads mix various text types and genres. This study explores strategies for translating a humor-laden, hybrid-text ad into Arabic through dubbing. It investigates the effectiveness of different Arabic variants. The case study is an audiovisual ad by standup2cancer.org, featuring a cartoon Homer from The Simpsons, created to raise colon cancer awareness. Animation often escapes criticism due to its surreal nature, unlike real depictions that might be distasteful. Using Skopos Theory, the translations were analyzed, focusing on the decision-making process in creating functionally suitable versions for Arab audiences. A Think Aloud Protocol gathered data on participants’ decision agency during translation, validating choices. Most translators (80%) preferred Arabic vernacular, employing domestication (adaptation) as a macro-strategy and cultural substitution as a micro-strategy. Humor transfer succeeded best in Arabic vernacular, reinforcing its suitability for various text types and genres.

Climatic apocalypse in Roman Ehrlich's "Malé"

The highly relevant topic of current environmental disasters and the climatic apocalypse is considered within modern German-language ecocriticism with a particular focus on the phenomenon of "catastrophe without event" (Eva Horn) and the connection between apocalypse and utopia. In this respect, fictional depictions of environmental disasters appear important, enabling the rethinking of emergencies caused by said disasters and provoking a confrontation with specific reality. The objective of the study is to outline contemporary environmental crisis experience summarized on the example of shared reality of Malé in the eponymous novel of 2020 by the contemporary German novelist Roman Ehrlich. The study aims to fulfill the following tasks: representation of the ecological world view of a contemporary German author Roman Ehrlich; identification of the literary semantics of ecological apocalypse; analysis of Malé as a novel with enshrined ecocritical ideas. The research is based on the principles of culturological literary studies combined with ecocriticism. The novelty of research lies in the use of ecocriticism principles in the analysis of the novel by the German writer to demonstrate the active role of human beings in organization and disorganization of the world as well as the helplessness in the face of mighty nature, the vast spaces which stop being living spaces, losing this quality to forces which evade monitoring, control and use. Thus, the topic of the novel is the contemporary world in decline which, for the German writer, is embodied in one of the most attractive resorts on the planet - the Maldives. Mass tourism, environmental pollution (of the ocean in particular), manipulation of ethical and moral norms, and global warming have resulted in exact and rapid negative changes that threaten the islands' existence. It has been established that Roman Ehrlich shows our daily life as a simulated state of security. While witnessing the looming disaster, islanders get immersed in limitless free entertainment, boredom and fundamental statelessness. The author avoids patronizing notes. The characters' helplessness in the face of the apocalypse is reflected in the novel via the inability to formulate an explanatory narrative position regarding the catastrophe. The author follows the idea of essential loss of convincing narrative on social achievements or losses. Roman Ehrlich employs distinctly distant language when describing the disaster and uses artistic potential to play it out. Analysis of the novel stimulates conversation about the modern ecological crisis and the response of modern people to it, who, on the one hand, contributed significantly to the current critical state and, on the other hand, are its direct embodiment.

The Adaptation of Western and Chinese Categories to the Description of Manchu

Summary Frequent contacts between European countries and China during the Qing period kindled interest in the languages spoken in the Qing empire and led to the publication of numerous Western books on Chinese varieties but also on the Manchu language. To describe the features of these distant languages, most of these works adapted Western linguistic categories and terminologies. This was the case of the earliest Western grammar of Manchu, Verbiest’s Elementa linguae tartaricae (1682). However, some Western works progressively integrated elements of the Chinese linguistic tradition. For instance, the grammars of Kaulen (1856) and Harlez (1884) refer to the Chinese categories “full words” (content words) and “empty words” (function words). Other Western works translated or drew on Chinese-Manchu bilingual primers, which in turn adapted the methodology and categories of Chinese philology to the description of Manchu, such as in the textbooks by Shěn (1682) and Wǔ-gé (1730). Their western translations (Domenge n.d.; Wylie 1855; Hoffman 1883) resulted in interesting examples of circulation of linguistic knowledge and amalgamation of descriptive categories.

The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity?

Why do swear words sound the way they do? Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude. To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity. In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages. The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y). In Study 1, native speakers of various languages (Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Spanish; N = 215) judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant. In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words. Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.

Multisensory Interactive Digital Text for English Phonics Instruction with Bilingual Beginning Readers

We investigated a technology-based tool for teaching English letter-sound correspondences with bilingual children learning phonologically and typologically distant languages: English and Chinese. We expect that learning about print at the phoneme level may be particularly challenging, given children’s experience with the morphosyllabic language of Chinese. This randomized-controlled study with 90 kindergarteners examined the effects of an iPad-based supplementary reading program compared with a control condition. The See Word Reading® program utilized picture-embedded cues for teaching phonics within lessons directed at the letter, word, and text levels. Measures of decoding, word reading, and spelling were taken at the pretest, posttest, and follow-up for both groups. Results showed better gains in word reading for the reading group, indicating the positive impact of this supplementary reading tool. Further, data collected online from the app showed that different types of letter-sound pairings were more challenging to learn, including pairings that are inconsistent and with phonemes that are specific to English.

Online-trip to Russia: creating a virtual sociocultural environment for teaching Russian as a foreign language

The necessity to develop new methods and measures in teaching Russian as a foreign language is caused not only by the growth of distant educational technologies, but also by new cognitive style generation formed in the circumstances of changing the natural surrounding into the virtual (the cyberworld) one. The lack of methodic instruments for compensating the language and sociocultural environment in distant teaching of Russian as a foreign language interferes the forming of students’ communicative skills. The aim of the research is therefore to develop and realize the sociocultural surrounding model for the foreigners learning Russian in conditions of restricted natural surroundings. The material of the research contained the digital culture and country study content created in line with culturological approach in pedagogy and linguistics and in accordance with distant Russian language teaching experience. The research was held with the help of theoretical (analysis, comparison, extrapolation), diagnostic (pedagogical observation, expert value, oral survey) and reconfiguring (pedagogical modelling, integration of the research results into the learning process) methods. The results of the research consist in working out the didactic and methodic demands for modelling a virtual sociocultural surrounding; creating on this base an interactive calendar “Trip to Russia” that corresponds with the cognitive type of the “digital” generation and allows to perform the functions of the sociocultural surrounding in distant learning of Russian as a foreign language: it promotes the development of sociocultural competence, positive attitude to Russia and Russians, increases motivation for learning Russian. In conclusion the authors present the opportunities of the virtual sociocultural surrounding to use it efficiently in studying Russian as a foreign language.

Uyghur–Chinese Adult Bilinguals’ Construal of Voluntary Motion Events

The study examined the implications of Talmy motion event typology and Slobin’s thinking-for-speaking hypothesis for the context of Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilingualism. Uyghur and Chinese represent genetically distant languages (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) that nonetheless share important framing properties in the motion domain, i.e., verb-framing. This study thus aimed to establish how this structural overlap would inform bilingual speakers’ construal of motion events. Additionally, it sought to offer an “end state” perspective to a previous study on Uyghur–Chinese child bilinguals and to shed light on issues around the longevity of crosslinguistic influence. Thirty adult Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilinguals were invited to describe a set of voluntary motion events (e.g., “a man runs across the road”). Their verbalizations, alongside those from 24 monolingual Uyghur and 12 monolingual Chinese speakers were systematically analyzed with regard to the kind of linguistic devices used to encode key components of motion (main verb vs. other devices), the frequency with which the components are expressed together (Manner + Path) or separately (Path or Manner) and how they are syntactically packaged. The findings show that the bilinguals’ thinking-for-speaking patterns are largely language-specific, with little crosslinguistic influence. A comparison of our findings with previous studies on Uyghur-Chinese child bilinguals revealed no developmental change either in the analyzed aspects of motion descriptions or in patterns of crosslinguistic influence. As such, the findings lend support to accounts that propose crosslinguistic influence to be a developmental phenomenon.

Improving Neural Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization via Employing Optimal Transport Distance for Knowledge Distillation

Current state-of-the-art cross-lingual summarization models employ multi-task learning paradigm, which works on a shared vocabulary module and relies on the self-attention mechanism to attend among tokens in two languages. However, correlation learned by self-attention is often loose and implicit, inefficient in capturing crucial cross-lingual representations between languages. The matter worsens when performing on languages with separate morphological or structural features, making the cross-lingual alignment more challenging, resulting in the performance drop. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel Knowledge-Distillation-based framework for Cross-Lingual Summarization, seeking to explicitly construct cross-lingual correlation by distilling the knowledge of the monolingual summarization teacher into the cross-lingual summarization student. Since the representations of the teacher and the student lie on two different vector spaces, we further propose a Knowledge Distillation loss using Sinkhorn Divergence, an Optimal-Transport distance, to estimate the discrepancy between those teacher and student representations. Due to the intuitively geometric nature of Sinkhorn Divergence, the student model can productively learn to align its produced cross-lingual hidden states with monolingual hidden states, hence leading to a strong correlation between distant languages. Experiments on cross-lingual summarization datasets in pairs of distant languages demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models under both high and low-resourced settings.