Ownership Of Texts Research Articles

Literary Post-editing and the Question of Copyright

Translation poses a challenge to copyright laws, which extend protection to works based on the originality of expression rather than the ideas expressed, because translations convey the ideas of the original in a different language and therefore also use different expressions. Technologization of translation has further increased this complexity, as tools such as translation memories and machine translation and post-editing practices are starting to also emerge in literary translation, calling for a more detailed investigation of the literary post-editor’s role and ownership of the text. Post-editing of machine-translated output could give rise to copyright protection, but this depends on the level of intervention and whether the post-edited translation is deemed sufficiently original. This article aims to investigate questions of originality, creativity and textual ownership in literary post-editing. We examine two cases where a literary text was machine translated, post-edited and then published. Our research materials consist of the peritexts surrounding the published translations and three epitexts: one publisher’s website, a research article written by one of the post-editors to describe the experience, and an interview with the other post-editor. Through a qualitative content analysis of these materials, we examine how they reflect the post-editors’ approach to post-editing, personal input in the process and textual ownership of the post-edited target text. The findings suggest that the two post-editors have different approaches to post-editing, leading them to differing perceptions of their own creative input and relationship with the final text.

The complexity of situated text design: a negotiation between standardization and spoken language in a manufacturing company

In information design textbooks, text design is mostly understood as typography and layout. The meaning-making process of language, involving social interaction that affects language, is rarely acknowledged. Instead, texts are supposed to be “clearly” written. In this research article, we argue that the understanding of text design could benefit from also addressing text production and use situated amid social activity. This article presents a study on a text design process partly based on spoken language and owned by assembly operators in a workplace. Capturing the spoken dialogue and transforming it into instructive texts resembling transcripts are essential steps in securing the best practices for the smallest tasks in manual assembly, the minima of working, which is crucial for manufacturing. Our aim within the information design field is 2-fold: To underline the meaning-making process in language as a social phenomenon and to show that the situated design perspective, i.e., an outlook that highlights the uniqueness of the setting, can be important for the production and use of certain texts, such as instructions, and for affecting language. We asked ourselves: What are the consequences for the information design field when meaning-making in a language is understood as being socially situated in an activity? We have studied a design process and used observations, interviews, and text analysis to gather data. The result showed that the workers' ownership of text documents is crucial for the texts' use, yet the texts used do not meet the standard of information design textbooks. Moreover, the design of the text involves a continuous and non-linear collective negotiation that balances standardization in language and work procedures with the incorporation of operators' linguistic improvements. We unfold a case of text design where there is a closeness of designer and user roles, a non-linearity of the process, and an understanding of an information design product as becoming rather than having been finalized for use.

Damn the Suit and the Tailor Who Made It: Power Struggle between the Narrator and the Editor in Nuevas coplas y cantares del temible bardo Eudomóndaro Higuera alias el Tuerto

ABSTRACT: The collection of poems by a supposedly long-dead Sinaloan poet Eudomóndaro Higuera (referred to in the study as “the Narrator”), Nuevas coplas y cantares del temible bardo Eudomóndaro Higuera alias el Tuerto , is an intriguing read. Compiled and annotated by Mario Bojórquez (who will be referred to as “the Editor”), it contains a strange mix of bawdy lyrics, insulting epitaphs, and soul-searching coded poems. The collection presents a challenge to the reader, who is forced to choose between the Narrator’s often simplistic writing and the Editor’s high academic analyses thereof. Using the theory of text ownership, I will analyze this contradictory combination to determine who—if anyone—controls the text of the collection. I will explore the roles of the narrator and the editor, taken up by both the Narrator and the Editor, in order to challenge the apparent parodic nature of the collection.

‘And thou shall find your path’: The Manifesto in Doctoral Writing Development

If writing pedagogy aims at writer development rather than text fixing, understanding how the writer sees that development is a key element of our skillset as writing teachers. In this article, we argue that a writing manifesto is a way for academic writers to express their development – one that, crucially, draws on semiotic resources outside the usual palette of academic writing. We situate this argument in the literature about reflective writing, which sees reflection as key in writing development, but which also points to the limits of certain kinds of reflective writing. Specifically, several scholars have noted how the reflective essay, traditionally conceived, tends to be constructed of formulaic mappable moves that can obstruct meaningful reflection. By analysing a corpus of manifestos created by doctoral writers, we show how the writers’ use of distinctive semiotic resources – irony, parody, font choice, layout – allow the writers to position themselves as agentive, and present themselves as the makers, not the recipients, of rules about writing. The manifesto, then, is a useful genre for enabling reflection and development because it can create space for writers’ agency and text ownership. Our analysis highlights the value of further discussion about alternate modes of reflective writing.

Concordancing DEVELOP* at the Interpreter-mediated Press Conferences

Thanks to the pragmatist Reform and Opening-up (RoU) program initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China, the largest developing country, has witnessed decades of sustained development and is poised to overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world. RoU is a major watershed in China’s recent history, signaling the beginning of China’s rapid economic development and meteoric rise over the past few decades in the global arena. The broader RoU discourse represents an important overarching metadiscourse, legitimizing China’s miscellaneous developments and policies, economic system, style of governance, and stances for the entire post-1978 period. In particular, ‘development’ is an operative word for and a key component of the RoU, which also constitutes a central and recurring theme throughout the interpreter-mediated premier-meets-the-press conferences in China. Development studies represents a growing and interdisciplinary research area. However, it is rarely explored from a discursive perspective in political interpreting, despite the vital mediating role of interpreters. To bridge this gap, framed within the broader trends of interdisciplinary research and digital humanities, the pragmatist mixed-methods approach of corpus-based critical discourse analysis is applied to the premier-meets-the-press data (1998–2017) to explore the government-affiliated interpreters’ agency and (re)construction of China’s ‘development’ discourse over one-fifth of a century. The study reveals the interpreters’ institutional (over)alignment and frequent strengthening of Beijing’s development discourse in English at different levels using various discursive means. Discursively, this established the interpreters’ role and text ownership in (re)shaping reality, further facilitating China’s development, (re)constructing and disseminating sociopolitical knowledge, and possibly even effecting changes and transformations to the East–West power differentials as vital (re)tellers of the Chinese story. Looking beyond the traditional view of interpreting as a more static and mechanical process in a semi-closed and self-contained system, this article discusses the vital role interpreting plays from a historical, communication, geopolitical and development perspective.

Text Recycling and Excessive Attribution: A Pragmatic Perspective

Text recycling—commonly referred to as self-plagiarism—is an issue that is currently garnering considerable attention with regard to its acceptability as a practice and questions of when, where, and how much of it can be permissible. Although the problem of self-plagiarism or excessive text recycling can, in the opinion of some, be circumvented by paraphrasing and the reordering of text, the practice does not constitute a legitimate means to generate new and original text. A possible means to moderate the problem of text recycling that is strongly recommended is a declaration statement explicitly stating and identifying the use of recycled text. Further problems with text recycling relate to questions as to who is the progenitor of any recycled text in question and therefore who is the owner, in a moral sense, of the text under scrutiny in cases of changing sets of authors. This leads to concerns over insufficient author attribution. On the other hand, excessive attribution can result if a too conservative mindset is adopted. Due care and cognizance of excessive/insufficient attribution are necessary to avoid such problems as well as a recognition of the concept of text ownership as described herein. Such concerns are not limited to text recycling but are present also for other types of contributions to a publication covering both mundane physical contributions (e.g., supply of materials, organisms, or apparatuses) and the continuing deployment of previously espoused or established metaphysical contributions (e.g., ideas, hypotheses, strategies, or concepts or the instigation of projects).

Visibility of Chinese ad hoc medical interpreters through text ownership: A case study

Professional interpreters’ visibility in the European context has been widely discussed in the field of community interpreting, but the visibility of untrained ad hoc interpreters in non-European contexts such as China has received little academic attention. By adopting the concept of “text ownership” proposed by Angelelli (2004a), this study examines Chinese ad hoc interpreters’ manifestations of visibility in an authentic medical setting. Based on field observations, audio recordings and interviews, the study reports on four types of visibility demonstrated by ad hoc interpreters: (a) replacing the interlocutor; (b) expressing affect towards a patient; (c) exploring answers; and (d) brokering comprehension. Other forms of visibility are also identified, such as omissions of doctors’ or patients’ remarks and small talk between doctor and interpreter. Interpreters’ deeply held views on social factors as well as the institutional and social norms they have been exposed to are believed to influence their manipulation of medical discourses. This study concludes that in a context where professional medical interpreting services are unavailable, ad hoc interpreters may act as linguistic facilitators by taking on various roles that go beyond mere interpreting. However, their excessive visibility may give rise to potential clinical risks, especially when direct doctor–patient communication is compromised. Attention is drawn to the importance of proper training as well as to the need for the professionalization of medical interpreting in China.

An Intelligent Three-Level Digital Watermarking Method for Document Protection

Digital text is the most frequent interchange form of data that could hold sensitive information such as audit firms, banks, and educational institutes. This sensitive information needs to preserve its integrity and originality so that it could not only secure the data but also helps to identify ownership of text documents. This paper presents a novel and invisible digital watermarking approach for the secure exchange of text documents over the internet. Digital watermarking serves from the last decade for detection of forgery and tempering from digital text documents and maintained the copyright and authentication successfully. Many states of the art watermark techniques achieve high imperceptibility, robustness, and high hidden capacity; unfortunately failed to maintain the balance among these three conflicting parameters. As resolvent, we propose an intelligent Three-Level Digital Watermarking (3LDW) system for text documents copyright protection. 3LDW system can be applied to Microsoft Word objects, document open spaces, and text feature coding without affecting the content of the original document. Experimental results reveal that our proposed 3LDW system strongly resist against formatting attacks and efficiently preserves the imperceptibility. Additionally, embedding capacity analysis demonstrates a prominent improvement of the proposed system as compared to other similar approaches.

A novel Bloom-filter-based scheme for secure text ownership protection

Due to the rapid growth of the Internet and content development services, digital text has become the most extensively used type of media in digital communication. However, digital text is at risk of being illegally tampered with, copied or redistributed, which could lead to many security threats related to privacy and ownership protection. Over the last few years, digital watermarking has been used to authenticate and protect the ownership of digital media such as images, audio, and videos. Compared to other digital media, digital text faces greater challenges in regard to watermarking due to its low capacity for information hiding and its high sensitivity to modification. While limited research has been conducted on text watermarking, the preliminary results indicate that the available schemes do not achieve an acceptable trade-off between imperceptibility, robustness, capacity, and security. In this paper, we propose a novel text watermarking method called Bloom Filter and Text Similarity Watermarking (BFTSW). A Bloom filter is employed in our proposed BFTSW method to reduce the size of the watermark that is generated based on a vector space model (VSM) representation of a text document. To verify the watermark, the text similarity between the VSM representation of the original text (which is recovered from the Bloom filter) and the VSM representation of a suspect text is computed and compared against a predefined threshold value to determine whether the watermark is present in the suspect text. Experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation show that the proposed BFTSW method is effective in terms of its robustness against malicious attacks, information capacity, and text quality preservation.

The Complexity of Textual Borrowing in Learning English As a Foreign Language

Exploring the notion of ownership of text and learning was potential to understand the question of textual borrowing. However, this relationship remained under-explored. This study would address two key research questions: (1) How did learners of English as a foreign language paraphrase texts and (2) How were their attitudes towards plagiarism. Data were drawn from texts produced by undergraduate students of English Department in reading comprehension classes. Two stages of analyses were carried out. Firstly, description of quality of paraphrasing the texts by the learners were presented and distributed. Secondly, the learners’ attitudes towards plagiarism were described. These analyses were used as starting point to interpret the student plagiarism. Findings and discussion revealed that 20% of the learners’ works were 100% unique. They agreed to say that plagiarizing was as bad as stealing an exam and that plagiarism impoverished the investigative spirit. The rest were plagiarized ranging from 5% up to 24%. They said that sometimes they felt tempted to plagiarize because so many other students were doing it. They argued sometimes they copied a sentence or two just to become inspired for further writing. Pedagogically, it implies that since paraphrasing is using one’s own words to express someone else's ideas, students should be encouraged to cite a source accurately and define unfamiliar words instead of being punished. They need to change any words or phrases that match the original so closely. The ideas and meaning of the original source must be maintained and words must be their own.

Chinese medical interpreters’ visibility through text ownership

The interpreter’s visibility in dialogue interpreting is a topic that has drawn extensive interest from researchers. Based on observation and recordings of 29 interpreted medical consultations at a hospital in Guangzhou, and replicating work on Spanish/English interpreting by Angelelli, this article analyzes Chinese medical interpreters’ achievement of visibility through text ownership. The dialogues, with interpreting between Chinese and English provided by four staff interpreters at the hospital, were transcribed and examined. Qualitative analysis of the transcriptions shows that the interpreters in some cases established partial or total ownership of the text and, as a result, became visible in the communication. According to how this visibility manifested itself, the medical interpreter’s text ownership can be seen as variously fulfilling four main functions: trying to expedite the drawing of conclusions; redirecting turns; expressing solidarity; and educating the patient. The research also shows that, while the purpose of a medical interpreter’s text ownership in medical encounters is to facilitate communication between the two parties to the dialogue, the visibility s/he gains by laying claim to part or all of a turn may actually prove counterproductive in this respect.

The Complexity of Textual Borrowing in Learning English as a Foreign Language

Exploring the notion of ownership of text and learning was potential to understand the question of textual borrowing. However, this relationship remained under-explored. This study would address two key research questions: (1) How did learners of English as a foreign language paraphrase texts and (2) How were their attitudes towards plagiarism. Data were drawn from texts produced by undergraduate students of English Department in reading comprehension classes. Two stages of analyses were carried out. Firstly, description of quality of paraphrasing the texts by the learners were presented and distributed. Secondly, the learners’ attitudes towards plagiarism were described. These analyses were used as starting point to interpret the student plagiarism. Findings and discussion revealed that 20% of the learners’ works were 100% unique. They agreed to say that plagiarizing was as bad as stealing an exam and that plagiarism impoverished the investigative spirit. The rest were plagiarized ranging from 5% up to 24%. They said that sometimes they felt tempted to plagiarize because so many other students were doing it. They argued sometimes they copied a sentence or two just to become inspired for further writing. Pedagogically, it implies that since paraphrasing is using one’s own words to express someone else's ideas, students should be encouraged to cite a source accurately and define unfamiliar words instead of being punished. They need to change any words or phrases that match the original so closely. The ideas and meaning of the original source must be maintained and words must be their own.

Building Up to Collaboration: Evidence on Using Wikis to Scaffold Academic Writing

Use of a wiki tool as a space for collaborative writing may be an effective way to expand the practice of academic writing, where working in groups to produce a collective text is a common occurrence in higher education. Evidence suggests wikis to be flexible tools which may improve collaboration and provide students with new skills. However, some research has shown that collaboration in wikis may be superficial and that their use may lead to increased workload for students and instructors. Because a great deal of academic writing is accomplished in groups, helping students build their collaborative writing skills is an important academic writing endeavor. This article provides evidence revealing both the potential of wikis to foster collaborative writing and important factors to consider before incorporating a wiki into an academic writing course. Scaffolding tasks to build up to cooperative group writing and introducing new ideas regarding text ownership can make wikis an effective space to practice academic writing. Weighing the evidence provided in this article may help instructors determine whether incorporating a wiki in their own context could constitute an additional space for students to develop their academic writing skills.

Authorship, Orality, and Print Modernity: Representing the Roma in Colum McCann’s Zoli

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Colum McCann’s Zoli (2006) is a complex reflection on the truth of art and representation, revealing a sense of profound ambivalence regarding the relationship between oral culture and textual modernity. Zoli, which is a novel about a Romani poet who creates literary works based on her communal oral culture, displays a sustained anxiety over the authorial ownership of texts. The article discusses how Zoli explores these issues through two main strategies: the formal construction of the novel through which McCann deflects and displaces the “original” voice of the Roma, and his fashioning of the body into a site where the tangibility of oral and print cultures become intertwined.

Venal Interchanges: Shelley's Queen Mab and Literary Property

British pirate publishers in the Romantic period competed not only for sales in the book market, but to establish a more democratic model for the ownership of texts. Attention to the material conditions and the motivations of the parties involved in producing illegitimate editions reveals how Romantic authorship was shaped by interactions between copyright law, authors' impressions of their rights, and the pirates' ability to subvert those prior claims. The texts and paratexts of some of the many unauthorized editions of Percy Shelley's Queen Mab (1813) will illustrate how the political and commercial intentions of radical publishers often counteracted Shelley's goals while working against the structure of the bookselling industry. Out of these very conflicts emerged the conceptions of that poem and, more broadly, the ideology of Romantic authorship that the radical political movement and later scholars came to know.

The commons, the Battle of the Book and the cracked enclosures of academic publishing

Contention about the ownership of texts and what we now know as copyright stretches back to at least the sixth century and the controversial copying of a biblical script by the Irish monk Colm Cille that resulted in the Battle of the Book. This article traces how my co- editors and I stumbled into this ongoing battle in our efforts to ensure this Supplement to the Community Development Journal on the commons would be freely available on the knowledge commons. Describing our search for cracks in the pay walls that commodify and enclose much publicly subsidised research that should be common knowledge, paradoxes in the current drive in academic publishing towards Open Access are considered, including its potential closing down of the publication of non-funded independent research.

Stationers' Register Online: A Case Study of a Byte-Reduced TEI Schema for Digitization (tei_corset)

This article examines the process of customization, digitization, up-conversion, and proofreading that took place as part of the Stationers' Register Online (SRO) project at the University of Oxford. This pilot SRO project received institutional funding to digitize the first four volumes of the book-entry Register of the Stationers' Company. This is an important source for book history in Britain as the Stationers' Register was the primary means through which ownership of texts was asserted, disputed, regulated, and monitored from 1577 until 1924. The article concentrates on the technical aspects of creating a byte-reduced TEI schema (tei_corset) which, because of the arrangement with the keying company, saved a significant amount of money. It looks at the creation of that schema, the up-conversion of the resulting XML, and the difficulties of proofreading such a large quantity of material.

Evolutionary Trends in Writing Pedagogy

This editorial offers a snapshot view of current trends in writing pedagogy, with the intention of raising awareness of some substantial changes taking place in methodologies, student populations, and teachers of writing. These changes, which are not revolutionary in nature but rather represent evolutionary trends, are nonetheless fairly dramatic in terms of (1) shifting the center of gravity of the field away from the United States and the teaching of writing to native speakers of English; (2) bifurcating the field into schools with different orientations to written texts and different methodologies for research and teaching; (3) disarticulating writing from reading; (4) raising issues of author identity and ownership of texts; and (5) potentially lowering the status and quality of the teaching of writing.

A novel approach to digital watermarking, exploiting colour spaces

Watermarking is the process of embedding information in a carrier in order to protect the ownership of text, music, video and images, while steganography is the art of hiding information. Normally watermarks are embedded in images but remain visible in the majority of commercial image databases, such as Getty (gettyimages.ie) or iStock Photo (istockphoto.com). However this leaves traditional watermarking techniques vulnerable to tampering. Thus the advantage of using steganographic techniques for watermarking is that the watermark is resistant to detection and consequently to tampering. Robustness is a characteristic of critical importance, in order that a watermark is to survive image manipulation and enhancement processes, as well as intentional attacks, to ensure piracy is prevented.The aim of this work is to produce a novel hybrid digital watermarking technique, based on the exploitation of both the RGB and the YCbCr colour spaces, using spatial domain techniques. Results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid technique can withstand levels of geometric attacks and processing attacks up to a point where the commercial value of the images tested would be lost. Results also demonstrate technical and performance improvements over existing methods, in terms of security and algorithm efficiency, while taking inspiration from steganography, to avoid drawing attention to the fact that an image contains hidden information.

A World of Impostures

As anyone who has delved into history of forgery can testify, sheer number of examples is positively breathtaking. Forgeries are ubiquitous. Yet it has also been noted, and in fact noted by many eighteenth-century commentators themselves, that Age of Reason produced an unusually large number of famous fakers: Thomas Chatterton, James Macpherson, George Psalmanazar, William Henry Ireland - to name just four, and just four in England. It is also striking degree to which period accounts of these forgeries routinely list other cases by way of comparison, many of which have been all but lost to us. A review of French edition of 's phony Description of Formosa, for example, published in 1705, compares him to false Princess of that had come to Paris a few years earlier. Some of her story has been preserved in memoirs of French Jesuit Louis Le Comte, who had spent considerable time in China and who had been called in to unmask her. He reports that she had been welcomed into most elite circles of Parisian aristocracy (and that she continued to play her role even after she had been exposed). We would certainly like to know more about her adventures.1A century later another East Asian impostor turned up in Bristol known as Princess Caraboo, who claimed to be from island of Javasu. Her story, like 's, is relatively well documented, and yet upon publication of full history of this female Psalmanazar in 1817, its author pauses to remind us of other cases such as fasting woman of Tetbury, Johanna Southcote, and the famous cheats and disguises of Bampfield More Carew.2 A 1764 review of Psalmanazar's memoirs lists Elizabeth Canning, Ashley and Jew, and Cock Lane Ghost.3 Subsequent writers such as William Hazlitt, Vita Sackville-West, and Ernest Hemingway all mention along with additional cases from their own day4The realm of literary forgery (including piracy) is even more densely populated, and not simply with famous examples like Chatterton, Macpherson, or William Lauder. Who remembers Richard Rolt, Alexander Innes, John Eccles, or William Douglas, M.D. - all of whom are listed in an aside on literary fraud in Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791)?5 A full list would be endless, and proliferation of fakes of every imaginable sort (counterfeits, frauds, impostures, hoaxes, art forgeries, pirated books) is matched only by our seemingly insatiable interest in finding out everything we can about them. Thus list of books about forgery is also dauntingly lengthy, both at macro and micro levels, both scholarly and popular, in all languages, fields, and periods. Do we really need another book on (eighteenth-century) forgery?It is into this minefield that Jack Lynch's new book, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008), bravely treads - and succeeds admirably. What is different about book is term detection, which is to say means by which eighteenth-century people actually went about trying to prove veracity (or lack thereof) of any particular claim. The real focus is not those who did faking but instead those who argued about it: How were these cases actually debated and discussed by eighteenth-century inquirers, and what do they tell us about eighteenth-century conceptions of world? (vii).The process of how a forgery could be proved or disproved was indeed undergoing major changes between time of (1704) and Ireland (1795), in arenas such as conception of personal identity and its consistency over time, of ownership of texts and copyright, of plagiarism and pirating, and of value and status of various kinds of legal evidence. Rather than organizing book according to individual examples and how each of them played itself out - a common technique that usually ends up just repeating stories themselves, entertaining as that might be - Lynch chooses to arrange material thematically. …