Language Boundaries Research Articles

Teachers’ ideological dilemmas: lessons learned from a Language Introduction Program in Sweden

ABSTRACT In this qualitative study, we draw on theory and practice in relation to the concepts of fixity and fluidity in language education (i.e. the simultaneity of bounded, named languages; and the need to transcend language boundaries). We use data from focus group interviews to investigate the entangled ideological dilemmas facing four teachers in a Language Introduction Programme in an upper secondary school in Sweden, as they enacted literacy pedagogies (fluidity) against the backdrop of high stakes standardised tests, age-out limits, and residency criteria (fixity) for youth from refugee backgrounds. We asked: What ideological dilemmas do language teachers in an introductory programme perceive relative to the language needs of youth from refugee backgrounds as they strive to implement promising practices? Our thematic analysis revealed three dilemmatic themes concerning ‘what’ to teach, ‘what’ resource materials to use, and ‘how’ to implement literacy pedagogies. From the lessons learned in our findings, we conclude with six thoughts for future consideration as teachers attempt to reconcile seemingly disparate perspectives on language teaching and learning in their local contexts.

Improving N-Best Rescoring in Under-Resourced Code-Switched Speech Recognition Using Pretraining and Data Augmentation

In this study, we present improvements in N-best rescoring of code-switched speech achieved by n-gram augmentation as well as optimised pretraining of long short-term memory (LSTM) language models with larger corpora of out-of-domain monolingual text. Our investigation specifically considers the impact of the way in which multiple monolingual datasets are interleaved prior to being presented as input to a language model. In addition, we consider the application of large pretrained transformer-based architectures, and present the first investigation employing these models in English-Bantu code-switched speech recognition. Our experimental evaluation is performed on an under-resourced corpus of code-switched speech comprising four bilingual code-switched sub-corpora, each containing a Bantu language (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, or Setswana) and English. We find in our experiments that, by combining n-gram augmentation with the optimised pretraining strategy, speech recognition errors are reduced for each individual bilingual pair by 3.51% absolute on average over the four corpora. Importantly, we find that even speech recognition at language boundaries improves by 1.14% even though the additional data is monolingual. Utilising the augmented n-grams for lattice generation, we then contrast these improvements with those achieved after fine-tuning pretrained transformer-based models such as distilled GPT-2 and M-BERT. We find that, even though these language models have not been trained on any of our target languages, they can improve speech recognition performance even in zero-shot settings. After fine-tuning on in-domain data, these large architectures offer further improvements, achieving a 4.45% absolute decrease in overall speech recognition errors and a 3.52% improvement over language boundaries. Finally, a combination of the optimised LSTM and fine-tuned BERT models achieves a further gain of 0.47% absolute on average for three of the four language pairs compared to M-BERT. We conclude that the careful optimisation of the pretraining strategy used for neural network language models can offer worthwhile improvements in speech recognition accuracy even at language switches, and that much larger state-of-the-art architectures such as GPT-2 and M-BERT promise even further gains.

The Joycean Outlex and the Promise of Feminist Lexicography

Abstract: This essay explores Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in light of lexicographic debates in the early twentieth century. As resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary grew in scope and accessibility, the practice and politics of lexicography transformed too. Some of Joyce's contemporaries, including Virginia Woolf, proposed feminist interventions in the making of dictionaries, asking how women might be better and more fully recognized in the widening field of lexicography. This study argues that Joyce's writings also stretched and replotted the parameters of the dictionary and suggests that he was aware of, and likely sympathetic to, its sociopolitical and often gendered constraints. "The Joycean Outlex" contends that Joyce's lexical experiments are consonant with certain shifts in modern lexicography—that he found in the dictionary a singular opportunity to challenge and widen the boundaries of language and literature.

Meaning-Making in the Untranslatability: A Translanguaging Analysis of the Film Love After Love

Films have been held for a long-term tradition as a meaning-making practice in visual and audio play, in the hybridization of language, image and sound, as well as in interactive symphonization with the audience/viewers. Through the emerging theoretical lens of translanguaging, this article analyzes the translingual practices, performance, instances in a Chinese film entitled Love After Love (adapted from Eileen Chang’s short story and directed by the Hong Kong Director Anne Hui), in which a Portuguese sonnet lyrical poem (Rimas) is delicately crafted in the film and projected in the trailer. Through this analysis, we aim to examine how translanguaging aesthetics transcend language boundaries, transforming from the seeming untranslatability to communicative meaning-making practice. The film presents a situated and embodied poem recital scene that encompasses untranslatable moments of imagination, thus transcending the Mandarin-English-Portuguese divide. The encounter and intertwining of heterogeneous languages and registers create a transformative space replete with tensions between reality and imagination, between lucidity and ambiguity, between resistance and compliance, interrogating the underlying discourses beyond languages and rendering the untranslatability meaningful. This translanguaging-informed film review thus offers an insightful autopsy of the literary aesthetics of the novel by Eileen Chang.

A Systematic Study on the Application of Information Technology in Teaching Japanese Translation Courses

Technological for the purpose of interlingual communication has gone through tremendous changes because of mechanical progressions. The significance of two important technological advancements in current translation is as follows: PC helped translation apparatuses and machine translation, which is talked about in this article. These innovations have further developed translation efficiency and quality, supported overall communication, and underlined the developing requirement for state-of-the-art specialized answers for the deep rooted challenge of language boundaries. These instruments, then again, give extensive obstacles and vulnerability to the deciphering calling and industry. People have proposed new standards for several disciplines and their own lifestyles based on computer technology. Because of its significant data advantage, network information technology plays a key role in traditional language translation. Thus, it is basic to comprehend how to more readily involve network data assets in the Japanese translation process, as well as to investigate changes in network data assets and merge the commonsense headway of the Japanese translation process, in light of the significant issue of Japanese learning and exploration.

Crossing borders and boundaries: Translation ecosystems in international business

The field of International Business (IB) has traditionally focused on the crossing of national boundaries. In this Perspective, we argue that organizational, knowledge domain, and language boundaries are equally important for understanding translation activities in cross-border business. We integrate three kinds of translation (organizational translation and knowledge translation from Organization Studies and interlingual translation from Translation Studies) to deepen our understanding of core IB phenomena and pose new research questions. We introduce the framework of a translation ecosystem for integrating the micro perspective of translating agents, the meso perspective of organizational units, and the macro perspective of the larger social and linguistic contexts that influence translation. This framework allows IB scholars to identify important but invisible boundaries in cross-border business. The translation ecosystem requires the kind of multi-level research that has been recognized as crucial for taking the field forward and offers the potential for making contributions both to IB and to translation research beyond the disciplinary boundaries of IB.

Inclusion of Migrant and Refugee Children in the Education System: Exploring and Overcoming Language and Social Boundaries in the Una-Sana Canton, Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) has become strongly affected by migrants from the Global South who aim to migrate into the EU. However, due to the strengthening of the external EU border, migrants increasingly remain in B&H for a longer period making it a receiving country for migrants, 20% of whom are estimated to be children. Since education is a fundamental human right and the inclusion of migrant children in the education system of B&H was essential for their healthy psychophysical development, the Una-Sana Canton initiated activities for their inclusion in the spring of 2019. In this paper, we detail the activities of professors and students of the Pedagogical Faculty of the University of Bihać who taught Bosnian as a foreign language to the migrant children which was a basic prerequisite for their inclusion in the regular teaching process. The role of local students in facilitating inclusion of migrant children became especially evident. In addition to emphasizing the value of collaborative learning between teachers, local children and migrant children, this paper also explores psychological, cultural and social boundaries and barriers that shaped the process of language acquisition, inclusive education, and collaborative teaching and learning.

Europæiske grænser (ud)foldet


 
 
 
 Many border-crossings take an extended form where it seems that travelers and mi- grants crossing a national border have not really crossed the border at all. It is as if they have taken the border with them and still exist in bubble-like extension of the territory they come from. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. In both cases, the external border has moved into the territory and become an internal border, either to the territory or the border-crosser’s self. The (il)logic of ext/internal borders may also apply to larger territories. But mul- tinational continental spaces pose their own challenges, since the folding of exter- nal territorial borders onto internal spaces through travel and migration overlays a space which is already divided into nations and, in the European case, the divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: It may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. In this article, I use border poetics to analyze how memories of in/external borders on both national and continental scales are publicly negotiated in the novel Spaltkopf (2008) by Julya Rabinowich, a coming-of-age narrative whose protagonist migrates from Russia to Vienna as a child.
 
 
 

Estimating Sentence-like Structure in Synthetic Languages Using Information Topology.

Estimating sentence-like units and sentence boundaries in human language is an important task in the context of natural language understanding. While this topic has been considered using a range of techniques, including rule-based approaches and supervised and unsupervised algorithms, a common aspect of these methods is that they inherently rely on a priori knowledge of human language in one form or another. Recently we have been exploring synthetic languages based on the concept of modeling behaviors using emergent languages. These synthetic languages are characterized by a small alphabet and limited vocabulary and grammatical structure. A particular challenge for synthetic languages is that there is generally no a priori language model available, which limits the use of many natural language processing methods. In this paper, we are interested in exploring how it may be possible to discover natural ‘chunks’ in synthetic language sequences in terms of sentence-like units. The problem is how to do this with no linguistic or semantic language model. Our approach is to consider the problem from the perspective of information theory. We extend the basis of information geometry and propose a new concept, which we term information topology, to model the incremental flow of information in natural sequences. We introduce an information topology view of the incremental information and incremental tangent angle of the Wasserstein-1 distance of the probabilistic symbolic language input. It is not suggested as a fully viable alternative for sentence boundary detection per se but provides a new conceptual method for estimating the structure and natural limits of information flow in language sequences but without any semantic knowledge. We consider relevant existing performance metrics such as the F-measure and indicate limitations, leading to the introduction of a new information-theoretic global performance based on modeled distributions. Although the methodology is not proposed for human language sentence detection, we provide some examples using human language corpora where potentially useful results are shown. The proposed model shows potential advantages for overcoming difficulties due to the disambiguation of complex language and potential improvements for human language methods.

Questioning translanguaging creativity through Michel de Certeau

ABSTRACT This article questions theoretically the conceptualisation of creativity put forth by the translanguaging paradigm, i.e. the speakers' ability to push and break language boundaries and flout behavioural norms. It does so by considering Michel de Certeau's view of everyday language use as creative by virtue of its being able to take advantage of a space of action. De Certeau's view emphasises the existence of constraints as a key aspect of creativity in everyday practices, which challanges the idea that multilingual creativity is necessarily to be seen as transcending boundaries and being disruptive.

Leveraging Integrated Learning for Open-Domain Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental technique in natural language processing that provides preconditions for tasks, such as natural language question reasoning, text matching, and semantic text similarity. Compared to English, the challenge of Chinese NER lies in the noise impact caused by the complex meanings, diverse structures, and ambiguous semantic boundaries of the Chinese language itself. At the same time, compared with specific domains, open-domain entity types are more complex and changeable, and the number of entities is considerably larger. Thus, the task of Chinese NER is more difficult. However, existing open-domain NER methods have low recognition rates. Therefore, this paper proposes a method based on the bidirectional long short-term memory conditional random field (BiLSTM-CRF) model, which leverages integrated learning to improve the efficiency of Chinese NER. Compared with single models, including CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and gated recurrent unit-CRF, the proposed method can significantly improve the accuracy of open-domain Chinese NER.

Indian Nationalism: Redefined in Today’s Time

The Feeling of love and pride towards the nation one is born in is purely natural. It is ingrained in almost every human throughout the world. Nationalism has many definitions. To be truly patriotic, one must feel a sense of belonging to one's own country and its people. To comprehend nationalism, one must comprehend citizenship. Nationalism is rooted in patriotism. Nationalism is based on loyalty. This way of thinking has unquestionably existed since the dawn of time. The concept unites citizens throughout the country. Patriotism also refers to allegiance to one's country. Nationalism is almost certainly the most powerful force in global politics. Numerous factors contribute to nationalism's rise. All citizens of a country share these characteristics. All of these elements are shared: language, history, culture, traditions, mentality, and territorial boundaries. As a result, a sense of community would develop among the populace. It will occur regardless of your wishes. As a result, countrymen would feel more connected and affectionate toward one another. Thus, patriotism fortifies the nation's citizens. The present aim of the study is to analyse the Indian Nationalism: Redefined in Today’s time.

Universal Speech Translator

In summary, Meta explains that this all-in-one translator is “pushed via way of means of the purpose of breaking down language boundaries on an international scale” the use of system gaining knowledge of technology. Since a mechanical perception, "This is a provisional computational prototype based on the Thinly Gated Mixture of Experts, qualified on data gained using novel and effective data mining methods personalized to low-resource languages. It is a model that forms the basis of universal translation. In the system, BLEU (short for Bilingual Evaluation Understudy).

The sound of absent-presence

Abstract This article engages with the theme of the proposed special issue in a perhaps unexpected way: for me, the ‘translinguistic movement’ is a pertinent reminder to move beyond the boundaries of language and other visible/audible modalities that are involved in semiosis. It also encourages us to move beyond the naïve empiricism that has shaped sociolinguistic work over the decades. The ‘sociolinguistics of the spectre’ that I develop in this article is rooted in philosophies of radical empiricism; it acknowledges the sensuous and affective nature of social life, and refuses to work with the ‘boundaries, binaries and demarcations’ that are located within the temporal ‘linearity of modernity’ (Garuba, 2013). In doing so, I will look at a particular time-space: the postcolony. It is a time-space where the ghosts of the past are ever-present and shape translinguistic practices; a time-space where time is always somehow ‘out-of-joint’.

Speaking Challenges in a Life Skill Program for Islamic Boarding School Students: A Case Study

The aim of this study was to explore students’ speaking challenges in a life skill program at an Islamic boarding school - Al-Fahd, South Sumatra, Indonesia. Through using a qualitative case study, we collected data by using in-depth interviews with participants at the research site. Our qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analyses by identifying, describing, organizing, and reporting them within a set of data in the form of themes. We structured our discussion around their viewpoints and the settings in which challenges they met appear. An exploration of the manuscripts or data revealed that major themes related to facing language boundaries, enjoying using mother tongue, coping with psychological issues, looking for interesting topics of conversation. The results of the study indicated that students were challenged by a variety of issues that had prevented them from having a good speaking skill in English although they were involving in a life skill program. Teachers and school leaders should provide them with a well-designed program in order to prepare them to face real life situations after finishing their program.

Classroom Oral Presentation: Students’ Challenges and How They Cope

Abstract. Classroom oral presentation is one of the techniques that has been used in any language classroom to provide an opportunity for language practice. This research investigates EFL students' challenges in classroom oral presentation and their strategies to face the challenges. The presentations covered group and individual presentations. Using a qualitative research approach and a descriptive design, authors collected data through in-dept interviews. Participants were four students of the English department of one private university in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, who had multiple experiences performing oral presentations in the classrooms that they had been attending for at least three years. The study found nervousness, group dynamics, audience, missing points, challenging content, language boundaries, and high self-expectation as the challenges the participants faced in classroom oral presentations. In addition, the study also discovered that strategies used to overcome the challenges were self-assurance, better preparation, peer discussions, directed eye contact, direct communication, backups, self-isolation, and presentation aids use. The implication is that in EFL classroom contexts, all factors surrounding the students might play a part in the way students view their experience and their success in an oral presentations. It also implied that eventually, students will have the ability to utilize the resources around them to solve their issues in an oral presentation. This gives an insight to how teachers can provide the environment that enables students to independently solve their problems. Keywords: Classroom Oral Presentation, Challenges, Strategies To Face The Challenges, CBI, CLT

Comics: An Alternative Medium for Education and Social Progress

The emergence of alternative media doesn't mean that it is there to compete with the mainstream press. This is not at all about quantity, but about quality and participation, about active citizenship, awareness, different perspectives, and most importantly, about the democratization of media. To get space in newspapers the marginalized community used the medium of comics to raise their voice. These alternative media will go hand in hand with the mainstream media to remind them of the issues involved and the silent masses, and so we need to take comics seriously. This paper will examine the role of comic to break the boundaries of literacy and language and use of comic art for increasing literacy and awareness and to raise the social issue in rural India.

Citizen science characterization of meanings of toponyms of Kenya: a shared heritage

This paper examines the toponymic heritage used in Kenya’s Authoritative Geographic Information (AGI) toponyms database of 26,600 gazetteer records through documentation and characterization of meanings of place names in topographic mapping. A comparison was carried out between AGI and GeoNames and between AGI and OpenStreetMap (OSM) volunteered records. A total of 15,000 toponymic matchings were found. Out of these, 1567 toponyms were then extracted for further scrutiny using AGI data in the historical records and from respondents on toponyms’ meanings. Experts in toponymy assisted in verifying these data. From the questionnaire responses, 235 names occurred in more than one place while AGI data had 284. The elements used to characterize the toponyms included historical perceptions of heritage evident in toponyms in their localities, ethnographic, toponymical and morphology studies on Kenya's dialects. There was no significant relationship established between the same place name usages among dialects as indicated by a positive weak correlation r (438), = 0.166, p < 0.001 based on the effect of using the related places and the distance between related places. The weak correlation implies that the one name one place principle does not apply due to diverse language boundaries, strong bonds associated with historical toponyms in the form of heritage and significant variations on how names resist changes to preserve their heritage.

In ʼn leefwêreld vervleg: Die gesprek oor Ingrid Jonker op Instagram

Intertwined in a living world: The conversation about Ingrid Jonker on Instagram. Ingrid Jonker is a legend in Afrikaans literature who is sometimes compared with figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean. Because she is such an important figure in Afrikaans literature, the current study examines the conversation around her on the social media platform, Instagram. The current study conducts an analysis of hashtags used in conjunction with #ingridjonker in order to determine which texts, people, places, films, musicians, plays, visual arts, emotions and the like are associated with her on this platform. Her strong connection with André P. Brink is highlighted and it is also shown how she remains relevant across language and medium boundaries.

Grasping the ‘idea of university’ – on crossing the language boundaries in Paul Ricœur’s idiolect on the example of an analysis of Faire l’Université, Réforme et révolution dans l’Université and L’avenir de l’Université

The aim of the paper is to analyse Paul Ricoeur’s idiolect in texts concerned with the(still valid) reform of the university: Faire l’Université (1964), Réforme et révolution dansl’Université (1968) and L’avenir de l’Université (1971). The research method used herecomes from cognitive linguistics, in particular from the theory of metaphor by GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson. Paul Ricoeur, outlining the extent of the necessary changesto be implemented within the institution of university, employs a whole range of conceptualmetaphors, including, among others, those from the language of the military (e.g. REFORMOF UNIVERSITY IS A WAR), industry (e.g. UNIVERSITY IS AN ENTERPRISE),medicine (e.g. UNIVERSITY IS A LABORATORY). Crossing language boundaries, Ricoeur offers an original conceptualization of the notion of university, thus emphasizing difficultiesencountered when describing the complex structure of the institution, its function withinthe state, and the professor–student relationship.