High-Performance English–Chinese Machine Translation Based on GPU-Enabled Deep Neural Networks with Domain Corpus

The ability to automate machine translation has various applications in international commerce, medicine, travel, education, and text digitization. Due to the different grammar and lack of clear word boundaries in Chinese, it is challenging to conduct translation from word-based languages (e.g., English) to Chinese. This article has implemented a GPU-enabled deep learning machine translation system based on a domain-specific corpus. Our system takes an English text as input and uses an encoder-decoder model with an attention mechanism based on Google’s Transformer to translate the text to Chinese output. The model was trained using a simple self-designed entropy loss function and an Adam optimizer on English–Chinese bilingual text sentences from the News area of the UM-Corpus. The parallel training process of our model can be performed on common laptops, desktops, and servers with one or more GPUs. At training time, we not only track loss over training epochs but also measure the quality of our model’s translations with the BLEU score. We also provide an easy-to-use web interface for users so as to manage corpus, training projects, and trained models. The experimental results show that we can achieve a maximum BLEU score of 29.2. We can further improve this score by tuning other hyperparameters. The GPU-enabled model training runs over 15x faster than on a multi-core CPU, which facilitates us having a shorter turn-around time. As a case study, we compare the performance of our model to that of Baidu’s, which shows that our model can compete with the industry-level translation system. We argue that our deep-learning-based translation system is particularly suitable for teaching purposes and small/medium-sized enterprises.

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

Rural, coastal communities in the Jobos Bay region of southeastern Puerto Rico confront disproportionate harms as an energy sacrifice zone. This space is constituted by imported fossil fuel dependency, economic and climate injustices, environmental racism, ecocide, US colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism. In response, many grassroots actors mobilize against the toxic assault on their communities to push for alternatives beyond the suffocating status quo via apoyo mutuo [mutual support]. This survival work and movement building occur literally in “the outdoors” and in other intertwined multispecies environments, challenging narrow, oppressive colonial, and consumerist constructs that reduce “the outdoors” to recreation and thus erase the numerous ways that people labor in, honor, and defend places and spaces to lead good lives. Thus, critical examinations of communication and race/racism/racialization in and about this colonial US territory must grapple with the brutalities and pain caused by systemic and structural cruelties and translate how, where, and with whom self-determined and potentially liberatory environmental and energy justice advocacy takes shape to refuse a trauma-only narrative. Studying these embodied and emplaced efforts positions energy and power broadly construed, including in the form of collective action. This article centers on the collaborative energies of local grassroots actors and scholars who ideologically and politically align and who value working together toward anti-colonial praxis. To provide one example of how these collaborations can yield public-facing projects that contribute to struggles tied to the survival and well-being of the most impacted communities, this essay focuses on the creation of an environmental justice children’s book. This bilingual text documents and translates the pollution caused by a US-owned, coal-fired power plant and mobilizations to topple this corporate invader. The article concludes by reflecting on some of the difficulties and possibilities that emerged during multi-year coalitional relationships that inform and exceed the children’s book. To reject racist and colonial dominant assumptions and discourses about outdoor spaces as only privileged recreational areas or as a “blank slate” devoid of people and culture, this project narrates how grassroots organizers and scholars persist in continued study and struggle for power(ful) transformations in Jobos Bay and beyond.

Identifying constitutive articles of cumulative dissertation theses by bilingual text similarity. Evaluation of similarity methods on a new short text task

Cumulative dissertations are doctoral theses comprised of multiple published articles. For studies of publication activity and citation impact of early career researchers it is important to identify these articles and link them to their associated theses. Using a new benchmark dataset, this paper reports on experiments of measuring the bilingual textual similarity between, on the one hand, titles and keywords of doctoral theses, and, on the other hand, articles’ titles and abstracts. The tested methods are cosine similarity and L1 distance in the Vector Space Model (VSM) as baselines, the language-indifferent methods Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and trigram similarity, and the language-aware methods fastText and Random Indexing (RI). LSA and RI, two supervised methods, were trained on a purposively collected bilingual scientific parallel text corpus. The results show that the VSM baselines and the RI method perform best but that the VSM method is unsuitable for cross-language similarity due to its inherent monolingual bias.

CROSS-CULTURAL EQUALITY AND CULTURAL TRANSFERS

В большинстве случаев текстовая коммуникация протекает в режиме, когда автор и его читатель (читатели) отделены друг от друга во времени и пространстве. Временной барьер между автором и читателем (читателями) определяет положение авторской проекции текста и читательской проекции текста относительно интерпретирующего диапазона текста. В статье рассматриваются особенности культурного трансфера для обеспечения равноценности двуязычной текстовой коммуникации. The time barrier between the author and readers determines the position of the author’s projection of the text and readers’ projection of the text relative to the interpreting range of the text. The article discusses the features of cultural transfer to keep up the equivalence of bilingual text communication.

Semantic Graphical Dependence Parsing Model in Improving English Teaching Abilities

It is a very difficult problem to achieve high-order functionality for graphical dependency parsing without growing decoding difficulties. To solve this problem, this article offers a way for Semantic Graphical Dependence Parsing Model (SGDPM) with a language-dependency model and a beam search to represent high-order functions for computer applications. The first approach is to scan a large amount of unnoticed data using a baseline parser. It will build auto-parsed data to create the Language-dependence Model (LDM). The LDM is based on a set of new features during beam search decoding, where it will incorporate the LDM features into the parsing model and utilize the features in parsing models of bilingual text. Our approach has main benefits, which include rich high-order features that are described given the large size and the additional large crude corpus for increasing the difficulty of decoding. Further, SGDPM has been evaluated using the suggested method for parsing tasks of mono-parsing text and bi-parsing text to carry out experiments on the English and Chinese data in the mono-parsing text function using computer applications. Experimental results show that the most accurate Chinese data is obtained with the best known English data systems and their comparable accuracy. Furthermore, the lab-scale experiments on the Chinese/General bilingual information in the bitext parsing process outperform the best recorded existing solutions.

Polylingualism and Transliterality in the Context of Hamid Ismailov’s Metafictional Strategy

The article is devoted to the problem of identifying meta-consciousness of the contemporary writer Hamid Ismailov in the context of contemporary theories of polylingualism and transliterature. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the specificity of Hamid Ismayilov’s meta-consciousness in the system of categories polylingualism, translinguism, polyliterarity with an exit to the author’s aesthetics of transliterarity. On the basis of the bilingual text “GEORGY CHEGODAEV: the Second soul or a Letter to London” specific markers of Hamid Ismayilov’s metaprose are identified, which allow to define him as a writer of polylingual, polyliterarity, whose estesis is predetermined by the EastRussian-Western transculturation. Translingualism is designated not as a conceptual definition of his work, but as a trend of the author’s integrated poetics. This approach is in correlation with theory of D. Durisin allows to remove the identification of contradictions.

Mediators of the association of limited English health literacy with medication non-adherence among Singaporean elderly

Background: In Singapore, English is predominantly used on prescription medication labels (PMLs). However, many older Singaporeans cannot read English, and among those who read English, their English health literacy (EHL) proficiency varies. It is thus pertinent to examine the link between EHL and medication use outcomes in this population. The present research aims to address this question. Methods: Data from a national survey, on 1167 home-dwelling elderly on ⩾1 prescribed medication was analysed. The validated Health Literacy Test for Singapore was used to determine EHL. Medication non-adherence was self-reported. Path analysis examined the association between limited EHL and medication non-adherence and tested possible mediators. Results: Limited EHL was associated with medication non-adherence (total effect=0.35; p-value: 0.032), and ‘uncertainty in taking medications correctly due to difficulty in understanding written information on PMLs’ was a significant mediator (indirect effect=0.23, 95% confidence interval (0.12–0.39)). Conclusions: Elderly people with limited EHL were significantly more likely than those with adequate EHL to report that they were uncertain about taking medications correctly because they had difficulty understanding the information on PMLs and this misunderstanding contributed to medication non-adherence. Interventions focused on incorporating bilingual text and/or pictograms on PMLs may reduce uncertainty in taking medication correctly and improve medication adherence among the elderly.