Indonesian Language Characteristics of Deaf Children and Implications for Literacy Skills

This research aimed to reveal the characteristics of the Indonesian language in deaf children and the implications for their literacy skills. A qualitative approach was used on the subjects determined through purposive sampling. Data were collected by recording student performance portfolios, interviewing teachers, and observing video recordings. The data were analyzed descriptively and explanatively. The results showed that the Indonesian language for deaf children is limited, as seen through four ways. First, the vocabulary of deaf children is dominated by general words (hypernyms) and concrete references. Second, they do not use figures of speech or idioms, compound words, and terms. Third, their ability to form derivative words is still low. Fourth, they generally produce core and single sentences, and only a small part uses compound sentences. The main and single sentences have an inversion pattern, where the verb precedes the subject. Moreover, they fail to use linking between sentences, and the resulting discourse is a collection of separate sentences. The linguistic barriers resulted in a low effective reading speed of 33.04 – 68, 30 words per minute. This has implications for low literacy skills. Therefore, an intervention program is needed to improve the language skills of deaf children.

Factors Influencing Aphasia Assessment for Bilingual Adults

This chapter provides a brief overview of stroke, aphasia, and aphasia assessment. Additionally, it considers various issues associated with the standardized assessment of aphasia, including problems related to cultural and linguistic biases. The chapter also includes information on working with people who are bilingual, as well as working with interpreters. A hypothetical case study is presented as a teaching avenue to discuss these topics in greater length. This section contains details regarding how both cultural and linguistic barriers associated with the assessment of the patient's aphasia may have influenced the intervention provided by the speech-language pathologist (SLP). Medical terminology and procedures related to stroke intervention are also discussed as it relates to the SLP's plan of care.

Narratives in conflict and the limits on the interpreter’s agency: A case study from the UN Peacekeeping mission in Lebanon

This article presents a socio-linguistic analysis of interpreting in conflict zones and paints a picture of the limits on the interpreter’s agency when working in the field. It focuses on the interpreter’s behaviour towards cultural and linguistic barriers in communication between foreign military personnel and the civilian population in Lebanon. The aim is to analyse the level of agency that the interpreter has when working in a military deployment, taking into account the context and the narrative features that require mediation. Data were gathered through interviews with interpreters in Lebanon and analysed by applying narrative theory. Knowing and appreciating both the theoretical context and the linguistic and cultural barriers identified through the analysis are fundamental to understanding the difficult role that the interpreter-mediator plays in conflict settings and to reflecting on interpreter training that is appropriate to this context.

Translation: A Key Component of a Hundred-Year Project

The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) has embarked on a historic endeavor of introducing a systematic and sustainable science education program within the traditional Tibetan monastic institutions. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who conceived and supports this initiative, calls it a hundred-year project. From the very beginning, translation from English to Tibetan has been an integral part of this project because of the need to prepare course materials as well as to facilitate on-site classes and lab activities in the Tibetan language. Our translation process involves not just conveying novel and foreign concepts across cultures but doing so with a scientific language peppered with technical terms that are not readily representable in the target language. In addition to the linguistic barriers, cultural and technical ones further complicate the process of communication. A case in point is the concept of life, or correlation versus causation, or the view that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, where each construct has its corresponding but differing concept in Tibetan Buddhism. When engaging with such existing parallel yet divergent terms or concepts, the translators must strike a delicate balance and avoid forsaking the distinctive characteristics and connotations involved. In this article, the ETSI translation team shares its journey—highlighting the needs felt, challenges faced, and solutions sought. We discuss the translation principles guiding our work and the handling of such scientific features as graphs, acronyms, units, chemical names, and formulas. We hope our work will inspire other similar projects around the globe and encourage them to continue bridging barriers to cross-cultural dialogues, promoting cross-fertilization of knowledge for human flourishing.

Memes and Media's Role in Radicalization

On September 16, 2021, Dr. Tina Askanius presented on Memes and Media Usage for Radicalization at the 2021 CASIS Vancouver Defence Security Advisory Network Workshop. The key points discussed were memes as cultural units of meaning, their serious global implications, their ability to easily break through cultural and linguistic barriers, and their intricate ability to serve as ‘gateways’ into more extreme elements of far-right ideologies.

Linguistic Impediments of Communicative Proficiency: A Case Study of Students in the CSHS, Shaqra University, Thadiq, KSA

This paper examines the linguistic barriers that impede English language communicative proficiency of the students of English language in the college of sciences and humanity studies, Thadiq, Shaqra University, Saudi Arabia. The paper gives the specific linguistic problems that detain attaining a perfect English language communicative competence. The paper also examines the teaching strategies that help students reach competency in oral skill. It concludes with some suggestions that help students to achieve a higher proficiency in English language communication. 

Detecting orientation of Brain MR scans using deep learning

There has been a steady escalation in the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Healthcare along with an increasing amount of progress being made in this field. While many entities are working on the development of significant deep learning models for the diagnosis of brain-related diseases, identifying precise images needed for model training and inference tasks is limited due to variation in DICOM fields which use free text to define things like series description, sequence and orientation [1]. Detecting the orientation of brain MR scans (Axial/Sagittal/Coronal) remains a challenge due to these variations caused by linguistic barriers, human errors and de-identification - essentially rendering the tags unreliable [2, 3, 4]. In this work, we propose a deep learning model that identifies the orientation of brain MR scans with near perfect accuracy.

Finnegans Wake: Beyond the Limits of Translation

Many deem James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake an untranslatable novel. Despite this, the characteristics that appear to obscure its meaning, such as semantic multiplicity and experimental syntax, also make it particularly open to interpretation and resignification—thus, to translation. The present paper proposes a flexible, creative, playful, and free approach to its translation. I discuss the possibilities derived from such an approach through the analysis and translation of fragments of Finnegans Wake into Spanish, and I support this approach to the translation process with some of the most prominent research on the translations of Joyce’s works, up to date scholarship from Translation Studies, and relevant testimonies from Joyce himself and from translators and writers who have studied his literary production. I argue that Finnegans Wake is a text that tries to capture language itself, transcends linguistic barriers by resisting rigidity of meaning, and achieves an “openness” and freedom that, paradoxically, have somewhat limited the efforts to translate it. Therefore, I propose that if Joyce did not limit himself in his creative process, it is necessary that we, as readers and translators, accept without fear the challenges presented to us by Finnegans Wake and dare to create new art from it.

Problematizing “Planning Ahead”: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Vietnamese Health and Community Workers’ Perspectives on Advance Care Directives

Informed by values of autonomy and self-determination, advance care planning assumes that individuals should independently take control of their future health. In this article, we draw on research conducted with Vietnamese health and community workers to problematize individualized approaches to planning ahead, reframe notions of “cultural and linguistic barriers,” and expose how homogeneous messages about care at the end of life are not readily translatable within and across diverse groups. Anthropological and feminist critiques of inclusion and exclusion are used to reorientate Anglophone framings of the individual and of cultural and linguistic differences. In this article, we suggest that it is the narrow singularity of care for the self—rather than diverse relationalities of care—that should be overcome if aging and end-of-life care policy and practice is to be broadened and made relevant to migrant and non-English-speaking groups.

Packing up the Past: Vicki Baum’s Quest for Heimat

The best-selling Austrian novelist Vicki Baum took ship alone for America in 1932 but emigration soon became exile for the Jewish author. The feeling of ‘Heimatlosigkeit’, or rootlessness, which oppressed Baum at that time was emotional and spiritual rather than physical. Child of a Jewish immigrant family in the anti Semitic society of nineteenth-century Vienna, Vicki Baum had long questioned the loci and the politics of Heimat, a German term whose significance far exceeds the simple definition of home or homeland. Cut loose from Heimat, she began her travels to far-away destinations, seeking to identify a common humanity and the universal moralities which could guide Europe to a better future. She wrote her travel experiences into novels which allowed her to narrate the landscapes and customs but also the inner lives of the peoples she encountered. A long-standing belief in the inauthenticity of verbal communication encouraged her to transcend linguistic barriers with confidence but it was her gender, she believed, which enabled her to share and interpret other cultures. Commonality rather than difference is the focus of her travel-letters and their fictional transpositions. Focusing on Baum’s experiences on Bali seen in a postcolonial perspective, the article argues that the island was for the novelist a space of transcendence, where the inhabitants held on to values already lost in Western societies.