• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.45
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• pp.109-143
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• 2016

This article examines distinctive linguistic shifts of translational English in an effort to verify the validity of the translation universals hypotheses, including simplification, explicitation, normalization and leveling-out, which have been most heavily explored to date. A large-scale study involving comparable corpora of translated and non-translated English newspaper texts has been carried out to typify particular linguistic attributes inherent in translated texts. The main findings are as follows. First, by employing the parameters of STTR, top-to-bottom frequency words, and mean values of sentence lengths, the translational instances of simplification have been detected across the translated English newspaper corpora. In contrast, the portion of function words produced contrary results, which in turn suggests that this feature might not constitute an effective test of the hypothesis. Second, it was found that the use of connectives was more salient in original English newspaper texts than translated English texts, being incompatible with the explicitation hypothesis. Third, as an indicator of translational normalization, lexical bundles were found to be more pervasive in translated texts than in non-translated texts, which is expected from and therefore support the normalization hypothesis. Finally, the standard deviations of both STTR and mean sentence lengths turned out to be higher in translated texts, indicating that the translated English newspaper texts were less leveled out within the same corpus group, which is opposed to what the leveling-out hypothesis postulates. Overall, the results suggest that not all four hypotheses may qualify for the label translation universals, or at least that some translational predictors are not feasible enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the translation universals hypotheses.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.265-270
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• 2014

Hearing-impaired people have difficulty in hearing, so it is also hard for them to learn letters that represent sound and text that conveys complex and abstract concepts. Therefore it has been natural choice for the hearing-impaired people to use sign language for communication, which employes facial expression, and hands and body motion. However, the major communication methods in daily life are text and speech, which are big obstacles for the hearing-impaired people to access information, to learn and make intellectual activities, and to get jobs. As delivering information via internet become common the hearing-impaired people are experiencing more difficulty in accessing information since internet represents information mostly in text forms. This intensifies unbalance of information accessibility. This paper reports web-based text-to-sign language translating system that helps web designer to use sign language in web page design. Since the system is web-based, if web designers are equipped with common computing environment for internet browsing, they can use the system. The web-based text-to-sign language system takes the format of bulletin board as user interface. When web designers write paragraphs and post them through the bulletin board to the translating server, the server translates the incoming text to sign language, animates with 3D avatar and records the animation in a MP4 file. The file addresses are fetched by the bulletin board and it enables web designers embed the translated sign language file into their web pages by using HTML5 or Javascript. Also we analyzed text used by web pages of public services, then figured out new words to the translating system, and added to improve translation. This addition is expected to encourage wide and easy acceptance of web pages for hearing-impaired people to public services.