Khmer Language Research Articles

Determinants of postpartum depression among women in Kampong Chhnang Province, Cambodia

ObjectiveThis study aimed to identify the prevalence of postpartum depression (PPD) and the factors associated with PPD in Kampong Chhnang Province, Cambodia. Study designA cross-sectional study. ParticipantsThis study included 440 Cambodian women at 6–8 weeks postpartum who visited health centers between July and September 2021. Materials and methodsData were collected through face-to-face interviews by midwives and nurses using a structured questionnaire. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) in the Khmer language was used to screen for PPD, and suspected PPD was defined as a total EPDS score ≥ 10. Logistic regression analyses were performed to identify the factors associated with suspected PPD. FindingsThe average age of participants was 28.6 years old. The prevalence of suspected-PPD was 30.2 % (n = 133). Factors associated with suspected PPD were income dissatisfaction (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 2.66, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 1.27–5.56, P = 0.010), unintended pregnancy (AOR = 1.99, 95 % CI 1.10–3.61, P = 0.023), and a partner employed as a manual laborer (AOR = 3.85, 95 % CI 1.11–13.33, P = 0.034), farmer (AOR = 3.69, 95 % CI 1.11–12.31, P = 0.034), and factory worker (AOR = 5.43, 95 % CI 1.38–21.41, P = 0.016). In addition, poor relationship with partners (AOR = 2.14, 95 % CI 1.17–3.94, P = 0.014), poor relationship with mother-in-law (AOR = 3.51, 95 % CI 1.70–7.21, P < 0.001), and a history of depression before pregnancy (AOR = 6.34, 95 % CI 1.59–25.34, P = 0.009) were significantly associated with suspected-PPD. Key conclusions and implications for practiceThis study highlighted the need for mental health services in primary healthcare settings. Mental health training for healthcare workers, particularly primary-level nurses, should be prioritized and strengthened. Further clinical study on EPDS validation should be carried out to justify the appropriate cut-off EPDS score for Cambodian women. The EPDS should be integrated into routine PNC services to identify women with suspected-PPD. Education on PPD should be provided not only to the nurses and midwives, but also to the women and their families to support the mental health of pregnant and postpartum women.

Variability of the phonetic structure of borrowings in the Khmer language

Variability of the phonetic structure of borrowings in the Khmer language

Teaching Mathematics at Upper Secondary School in the Digital Age: A Case Study in Cambodia

The research showed (1) Necessity, (2) Challenges, and (3) Solutions in teaching mathematics. At the same time, teachers, learners, and stakeholders were encouraged to develop soft skills and hard skills that intervened positively to ensure the quality of education in line with regional and global educational trends to achieve the goal of education for all in the new millennium. However, surveys clearly show that limited digital technology and inadequate digital materials were at the root of the problems. Practical observations provided a fair number of results and some points showed the relationship between the quality of teaching and learning in supportive strategies. The research questions were: (1) What are the requirements for teaching mathematics at the high school in the digital age? (2) What are the challenges of implementation of mathematics teaching at the high school in the digital age? (3) What are the solutions for teaching mathematics at the high school? The research methods through quantitative data were collected from principals, deputy principals, deputy directors, technical team leaders, mathematics teachers, and high school students through questionnaires in Khmer language to investigate the link between teaching management and mathematics learning where N (principals, teachers, students) = N (90,158,933). The results of the analysis on ( ) 1 2 3 x =2.96 , x =3.26 , x =3.32 and F(2 , 36) = 8.534, p &lt; 0.05 showed that the conceptual framework expressions for the three independent variables were quite different and teaching mathematics was challenging more than solutions and needs which were lower than finding solutions. In this sense, teaching materials and teaching talent were the main keys to improving the quality of education while the situation was not good; it was unsuccessful because the support or implementation of information and communication technology and technology was still limited and the use of teaching strategies showed positive and negative effects as arguments for further study on the application of teaching methods.

Interpretation and translation in atrocity trials: insights from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

This article draws attention to some of the ways the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’s (ECCC) proceedings have been shaped by the process of translation, interpretation and vernacularisation. In doing so, it seeks to add a novel case study to a growing literature that exposes the central role of language professionals in the operation of international courts and tribunals. The article highlights challenges that arose at the ECCC around the interpretation, translation and vernacularisation of legal concepts, using the examples of ‘genocide’ and ‘reparation’ to demonstrate how a focus on linguistic translation can obscure the more substantial vernacularisation work involved in rendering legal concepts legible. It then explores the challenges raised by victims’ and witnesses’ use of euphemism, interrogating different approaches towards translating and interpreting euphemism in the context of a criminal trial. Finally, it explores victims’ and witnesses’ use of Khmer Rouge jargon, and the challenges that posed for Khmer language professionals born after the fall of the regime. Drawing from these examples, the article emphasises the need for international criminal institutions to take the process of translation seriously, to understand it as significantly more than a technical linguistic exercise, and to give thought to the additional resources, training and expertise that might be needed to ensure accuracy both in the courtroom and when communicating concepts and processes outside the courtroom. This extends both to the training and resources that interpreters and translators might need, and the cultural awareness and sensitivity that legal practitioners might need in order to engage with victims and witnesses across language barriers.

Consumer Perceptions and Behaviors on Digital Payment Adoption Among Older Generation Z and Younger Millennials in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Purpose: The study's goal is to better understand how older and younger generations in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, behave when it comes to using digital payments. Investigating the choice of mobile payment application in the Phnom Penh region is another objective of this study. Here, it is also investigated how usage, economic situation, and adoption of mobile payments are related.&#x0D; &#x0D; Theoretical framework: One of the most well-known research models on consumer behavior among younger and older generations and the adoption of new technical systems emphasizes the influence of geography, socioeconomic status, and specific traits on consumer acceptance. The concept considers factors including social effects, credibility requirements, effort expectations, and performance requirements when determining the best digital payment application.&#x0D; &#x0D; Design/Methodology/Approach: The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model and K-mean clustering for distance and economic status studies were used in this research paper to select 150 locals in Phnom Penh from the target population in order to study consumer behavioral intention to accept digital payment method and application.&#x0D; &#x0D; Findings: The result we aimed to show and analyses the Digital payment methods, payments sharing, receiving, storing evidences, that older generation started understanding the digital payment by Khmer language and accepting the digital transactions from known customers. The current generation using Sathapana application and English Language in wide ranges through the Phom Penh region. The study also trying to exhibit the purpose of the digital payment systems in and across the e-commerce activities, through the older and younger generation.&#x0D; &#x0D; Research, Practical &amp; Social implications: The elder generation Z handled digital payments for regional transactions like banking, home tasks, loan repayment, peer lending, travel, and local marketplaces in Khmer. The subsequent generations of millennials also incorporated cross-border payments in English and Khmer.&#x0D; &#x0D; Originality/Value: Bringing up a Digital Platform shall make a positive change in economy and circulation of economy to the people and country. Unless the people trust the digital payments, they cant share their money for the business or basic operations to run the government. Thy the Digital Payment applications shall understand the behavior of the customers and share the services through the digital payment systems.

Khmer Sentiment Lexicon Based on PU Learning and Label Propagation Algorithm

The sentiment lexicon is an important tool for natural language processing tasks. In addition to being able to determine the sentiment polarity of words or phrases, it can assist attribute-level, sentence-level, and text-level sentiment analysis tasks. In light of the fact that tagging data and corpora for the Khmer language are scarce, where most resources related to sentiment lexicons are for English, this paper proposes a method for constructing a sentiment lexicon for Khmer based on Positive-Unlabeled learning (PU Learning) and the label propagation algorithm. Sentiment words are first extracted from a corpus using the Spy technique of PU learning method. The main idea is to purify the set of N-class examples, train the MLP classifier, and continuously delete spy words and increase the number of P-class words in the iterative process. Following this, the sentiment polarity of the candidate words is determined. By considering the problem of determining the sentiment polarity of the candidate words as one of calculating its probability distribution, a small number of labeled sentiment words and candidate words are used to construct a graph model. The contextual information of the candidate words is used to construct a simple supplementary graph model of the set of sentiment words through word co-occurrence and triangulation, where this enhances the correlation between data items. The sentiment polarity of the candidate words is then determined through the label propagation algorithm. The results of experiments show that the proposed method can be used to construct a Khmer sentiment lexicon with a small number of labeled data and a small corpus without requiring excessive manual labeling.

Factors Affecting Khmer Major Students’ Motivation to Learn the Khmer Language During The Covid-19 Online-Teaching Periods at Tra Vinh University

ABSTRACT This article reports on responses from an online survey designed with 27 questions to explore the factors affecting the main motivation of Khmer major students during the COVID-19 online teaching period at Tra Vinh University (TVU), the only higher education institution in Vietnam that offers undergraduate degrees in the Khmer language (n = 50). Due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, Khmer students were asked about variables linked to technology, pedagogy, and instructional content that might affect their willingness to study the Khmer language throughout their online learning period (the last one was from June 2021 to mid-February 2022). The data illustrates the primary groupings of factors that influence learners and their responses to each component, as well as their learning goals. The study’s findings identify the factors influencing Khmer students’ motivation to learn Khmer online at TVU in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic; discuss and make three recommendations on: (1) using the TPACK framework; (2) implementing measures to promote strengths and limit weaknesses in the TVU online training process; and (3) attesting to the effectiveness of ethnic minority policies as well as their actual implementation in Vietnam.

Health service use and associated factors among old Khmer people: a cross-sectional survey in Tri Ton District, An Giang Province

The health status of ethnic minorities of all ages lags far behind that of the general population, particularly in the old. The old minor ethnic population is more likely to have chronic diseases but less likely to access health services. This study assesses the rate of health services use and associated factors in the old Khmer population. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 400 Khmer people aged 60+ year-old from March to May 2020. Eligible participants were randomly recruited from households of five clusters out of nine communes of Tri Ton District, An Giang province, Vietnam. A structured questionnaire was designed to collect data on socio-demography, health status, health service use and accessibility to health services and quality of life. Quality of life was measured using EQ-5D-5L. All eligible participants were face-to-face interviewed by a bilingual researcher. The rate of health services use was 63.3%. The EQ-5D-5L utility index mean score was 0.46 (SD=0.28) and EQ-VAS mean score was 49.01 (SD=16.19). The odds of using health services were higher in those reported to have problems in mobility (OR=2.56, 95%CI 1.43-4.61, p&lt;0.01), self-care (OR=2.05, 95%CI 1.30-3.24, p&lt;0.01), activity (OR=2.35, 95%CI 1.44-3.82, p&lt;0.01), pain/discomfort (OR=2.63, 95%CI 1.22-5.67, p=0.01), and anxiety/depression (OR=2.07, 95%CI 1.00-4.29, p=0.05) in univariate but not in multivariable analysis. The multivariable logistic regression showed that the odds of using health services were lower in those who were currently working (aOR=0.48, 95%CI 0.30-0.79, p&lt;0.01), accessible to health information (aOR=0.47, 95%CI 0.27-0.80, p&lt;0.01), but higher in those using health insurance (aOR=5.09, 95%CI 3.19-8.14, p&lt;0.01), and in health facilities used Khmer language (aOR=2.04, 95%CI 1.15-3.62, p=0.01). This study suggested that Khmer people should be involved in all stages of planning and implementing health programs and services for Khmer communities to improve the accessibility and health equity.

Khmer onset voicing at the end of the 13th century

Abstract Khmer displays extensive diachronic phonological restructuring (Huffman, 1976), especially in the realization of initial stops. These changes include (i) devoicing and merger of voiced and voiceless stops, and (ii) the emergence of implosives from pre-vocalic voiceless stops. However, the details and the chronology of these changes remain unclear in many respects. This paper proposes a chronology of the two changes based on philological evidence: Chinese transcriptions of Khmer words in the Zhēnlà Fēngtǔ Jì (ZFTJ), a travel account from the late 13th century. Previous research on ZFTJ by Pelliot (1951) suggested that implosives had already emerged at the time of transcription, while the merger of voiced and voiceless stops had at least started. This is at odds with the general view of Khmer language history. I motivate a revised analysis of the Khmer transcriptions in the ZFTJ and show that the devoicing and merger of voiced and voiceless stops in fact had not yet occurred at the end of the 13th century. There is, however, not enough evidence from ZFTJ to confirm whether implosives had already emerged.

Communicating time, place, and history

AbstractProlung Khmer(ព្រលឹងខ្មែរ, meaning “Khmer Soul” or “Khmer Spirit”), is a culturally salient ideological discourse found in modern Cambodian culture in the homeland and the diaspora.Prolung Khmerdraws on symbols and practices from Cambodia’s 2000-year cultural heritage, linking Khmer history, religion, language, the arts, and socio-political relationships in an essentialized ideology of Khmer culture. Using a genealogical analysis, this article traces the historical development ofProlung Khmerfrom earliest times to the present with examples from Cambodia and the diaspora. We argue that through its use,Prolung Khmerdelineates, historicizes, and naturalizes what it means to be Khmer in the homeland and the diaspora.

Pretrained models and evaluation data for the Khmer language

Trained on a large corpus, pretrained models (PTMs) can capture different levels of concepts in context and hence generate universal language representations, which greatly benefit downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In recent years, PTMs have been widely used in most NLP applications, especially for high-resource languages, such as English and Chinese. However, scarce resources have discouraged the progress of PTMs for low-resource languages. Transformer-based PTMs for the Khmer language are presented in this work for the first time. We evaluate our models on two downstream tasks: Part-of-speech tagging and news categorization. The dataset for the latter task is self-constructed. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the Khmer models. In addition, we find that the current Khmer word segmentation technology does not aid performance improvement. We aim to release our models and datasets to the community in hopes of facilitating the future development of Khmer NLP applications.

English proficiency: Key to educational opportunities for Cambodian students

Cambodia has experienced some changes in the foreign language landscape in its recent history before having English as the most popular foreign language at present. However, research has shown that the English proficiency of Cambodians is low, which is troubling considering the role of English in educational opportunities. This article provides a brief historical background of foreign languages in Cambodia and explains how English opens doors to educational opportunities as it is the language of the internet and the Massive Open Online Courses. Moreover, as a global lingua franca, English serves as a language for overseas educational opportunities and research and publication. The article concludes with a word of caution regarding the embrace of English and the need to preserve the Khmer language.

Young Khmer Women’s Expectation on Their Future Spouse

Society is constantly moving and changing. Criteria for choosing a life partner is very important for each person and so are Khmer girls in Vietnam. To find out the criteria for choosing a life partner of Khmer women today, the author uses the survey questionnaires and in-depth interviews with 20 Khmer female second-year students in School of Vietnam Southern Khmer Language, Culture, and Arts, Tra Vinh University. The results show that 80% of interviewees think that marriage is important in life, 65% set up their criteria for choosing a life partner with a stable career. 75% share the same opinion that those who have been monastics are knowledgeable, virtuous, have an altruistic, tolerant heart, have mature thoughts, and have a deep understanding of Khmer morality and customs.

A review of Khmer word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging and an experimental study using bidirectional long short-term memory

Large contiguous blocks of unsegmented Khmer words can cause major problems for natural language processing applications such as machine translation, speech synthesis, information extraction, etc. Thus, word segmentation and part-of- speech tagging are two important prior tasks. Since the Khmer language does not always use explicit separators to split words, the definition of words is not a natural concept. Hence, tokenization and part-of-speech tagging of these languages are inseparable because the definition and principle of one task unavoidably affect the other. In this study, different approaches using in Khmer word segmentation and part-of-speech are reviewed and experimental study using a single long short-term memory network is described. Dataset from Asia Language Treebank is used to train and test the model. The preliminary experimental model achieved 95% accuracy rate. However, more testing to evaluate the model and compare it with different models is needed to conduct to select the more higher accuracy model.

Khmer printed character recognition using attention-based Seq2Seq network

This paper presents an end-to-end deep convolutional recurrent neural network solution for Khmer optical character recognition (OCR) task. The proposed solution uses a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) architecture with attention mechanism. The encoder extracts visual features from an input text-line image via layers of convolutional blocks and a layer of gated recurrent units (GRU). The features are encoded in a single context vector and a sequence of hidden states which are fed to the decoder for decoding one character at a time until a special end-of-sentence (EOS) token is reached. The attention mechanism allows the decoder network to adaptively select relevant parts of the input image while predicting a target character. The Seq2Seq Khmer OCR network is trained on a large collection of computer-generated text-line images for multiple common Khmer fonts. Complex data augmentation is applied on both train and validation dataset. The proposed model’s performance outperforms the state-of-art Tesseract OCR engine for Khmer language on the validation set of 6400 augmented images by achieving a character error rate (CER) of 0.7% vs 35.9%.

Implementation of multilingual mother tongue education in Cambodian public schools for indigenous ethnic minority students

Abstract In this qualitative interpretive policy analysis case study, we examine the Cambodian government’s adoption and expansion of a Multilingual Education (MLE) program for speakers of different indigenous ethnic minority languages across five Northeastern provinces. Data include MLE policy documents and curriculum, observations in MLE schools, and interviews and focus groups with NGO staff, government officials, MLE Core Trainers, local MLE teachers, and school board members. We also analyze the nature of Khmer and indigenous language use and the nature of teaching and learning in the MLE schools and classrooms. Findings reveal significant success in establishing new schools and programs, expanding access to nearly 5,000 indigenous students, but also identify a number of challenges related to the governments’ capacity to further develop and expand MLE, with continual reliance on NGOs for technical and other support. Analyses of classroom observation data provide evidence of fidelity to the MLE model and curriculum, effective teaching and learning, and highly engaged teachers and students.

Analyzing the readability of Khmer language textbooks.

Textbooks play a vital role in the process of teaching and learning, especially in education systems where they are the only resources available to teachers and students. Despite this indispensable role, textbooks in Cambodia have ongoing problems concerning their content and design. This paper analyzes the readability of passages in Khmer textbooks (Flesch, 1948); Kincaid et al., 1975, as cited in DuBay, 2004. Reading passages were extracted from the Grade 3, Grade 6 and Grade 9 Khmer textbooks published by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. It was found that the readability of these textbooks was not in line with the reading level of students. For instance, on average, 20 words per sentence were used, which is equivalent to a Grade 10 level (Flesch, 1975). Further, while the number of words and sentences did not significantly vary across the three grade levels, the number of syllables and words did. These findings have implications for publishers and authors when designing reading passages in textbooks if they are to have an appropriate level of readability for their intended users at each grade level.

A Qualitative Study of Grandparents lullaby: Wisdom of the elderly for Early Child development through Northern-Khmer Child Rearing Cultural Transmission Process in Community way of life

The objective of this research is to study the elements of the process of transmission of the Khmer language wisdom and culture of grandparents through lullabies. Culture shows beliefs, values, morals and social aspects, lifestyle, customs, language, daily living and activities of people in the community. The qualitative study was conducted with in-depth interviews of three Northern-Khmer elders and included the study the lullaby songs of the elderly in the community of CHANGWAT SURIN.The results of this study found that the elements of the process of cultural transfer of the elderly through lullabies include five aspects, namely 1) content, 2) knowledge transfer, 3) characteristics of the transmitters and receivers, 4) methods and media and 5) evaluation. The process of transferring culture from wisdom that we can develop for the purpose of inheritance can be of various forms of recording, such as, audio recording, video recording as well as transcription in order for preservation.

English Pronunciation Challenges for English Major University Students in Battambang Province

English pronunciation is a challenging skill for non-native English speakers across the globe. Cambodian English students are no exception. This article presents findings from a study that employed mixed method research design to collect data from second-year and third-year university students majoring in English. Online questionnaires were administered through Google Forms to 70 students, while in-depth interviews were later conducted with 10 of the questionnaire respondents. The findings indicated that Cambodian university students based in provincial Cambodia encountered several challenges in developing their English pronunciation. The challenges were mainly influenced by Khmer language interference and the impact of the learning environment. The study suggested using an imitative or analytic-linguistic approach as well as pronunciation drillings to teach English pronunciation to Cambodian students, particularly those in provincial areas.

Return to education and labor market in Cambodia: evidence form labor force survey 2012 and CSES 2014

This paper mainly estimates the returns to education employing the standard Mincerian function using the latest Cambodian labor force survey 2012, where the dependent variable is the natural logarithm of earnings and independent variables include years of schooling or educational attainment and potential experience. The paper also examines the effect of foreign language skills on earnings. This paper is divided into three sections. The first section examines Cambodia’s labor markets. The second section explores the econometric model, in particular, Mincerian function to estimate returns to education using the latest labor force survey conducted in 2012. We find that for employed persons with an educational level lower than or equal to grade 12 it is about 3.3 percent; but it is higher for males. The annualized rate of return to education for undergraduate level was approximately 17 percent. Regarding language skill, we find that people who hold a bachelor degree and can speak English can earn more than those who can speak only Khmer language. There is also a significant wage gap between bachelor holders and high school certificate holders at a ratio of 1.9.