Meaning-Change Through the Mistaken Mirror: On the Indeterminacy of “Wundt” and “Piaget” in Translation

What does a name mean in translation? Quine argued, famously, that the meaning of gavagai is indeterminate until you learn the language that uses that word to refer to its object. The case is similar with scientific texts, especially if they are older; historical. Because the meanings of terms can drift over time, so too can the meanings that inform experiments and theory. As can a life’s body of work and its contributions. Surely, these are also the meanings of a name; shortcuts to descriptions of the author who produced them, or of their thought (or maybe their collaborations). We are then led to wonder whether the names of scientists may also mean different things in different languages. Or even in the same language. This problem is examined here by leveraging the insights of historians of psychology who found that the meaning of “Wundt” changed in translation: his experimentalism was retained, and his Völkerpsychologie lost, so that what Wundt meant was altered even as his work—and his name—informed the disciplining of Modern Psychology as an experimental science. Those insights are then turned here into a general argument, regarding meaning-change in translation, but using a quantitative examination of the translations of Piaget’s books from French into English and German. It is therefore Piaget who has the focus here, evidentially, but the goal is broader: understanding and theorizing “the mistaken mirror” that reflects only what you can think to see (with implications for replication and institutional memory).

Conceptual Dimensions of Pedagogical Differentiation in School Education

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the conceptual content of pedagogical differentiation in school education, as it emerges from the descriptions and discussion of authors, researchers and experts through content analysis of 22 publications in the Greek and international literature in various scientific texts, books, journal articles and conferences. From the analysis that was performed, twelve dimensions or otherwise characteristics of pedagogical differentiation emerged that presented the highest frequency of occurrence and were included in four broad categories that are: a. “processes”, b. “context”, c. “the learning outcomes” and d. “assessment”. The results of the research show that in secondary education the dimension with the highest frequency is the modification of the supportive learning context, followed by meeting the needs of the students and the continuous improvement of the learning for all students. From the publications studied on pedagogical differentiation, which referred to primary and secondary education together, it appears that the most frequent dimensions are the modification of the supportive learning context and meeting the needs of the students. Dimensions with the lowest frequency of occurrence in secondary education include the possibility of learning option / multiple options, the development of procedural knowledge skills and continuous assessment, while in the publications for primary and secondary education together, the dimensions of development of life skills and continuous assessment were not identified.

A Corpus-Assisted Translation Study of Strategies Used in Rendering Culture-Bound Expressions in the Speeches of King Abdullah II

Translation is defined as transferring meaning and style from one language to another, taking the text producer's intended purpose and the audience culture into account. This paper uses a 256,000-word Arabic-English parallel corpus of the speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan from 1999 to 2015 to examine how some culture-bound expressions were translated from Arabic into English. To do so, two software packages were used, namely Wordsmith 6 and SketchEngine. Comparing the size of the Arabic corpus with its English counterpart using the wordlist tool of WS6, the researchers found that the number of words (tokens) in the English translation is more than the Arabic source text. However, the results showed that the Arabic language has more unique words, which means that it has more lexical density than its English counterpart. The researchers carried out a keyword analysis and compared the Arabic corpus with the ArTenTen corpus to identify the words that King Abdullah II saliently used in his speeches. Most of the keywords were culture-bound and related to the Jordanian context, which might be challenging to render. Using the parallel concordance tool and comparing the Arabic text with its English translation showed that the translator/s mainly resorted to the strategies of deletion, addition, substitution, and transliteration. The researchers recommend that further studies be conducted using the same approach but on larger corpora of other genres, such as legal, religious, press, and scientific texts.

A comparative evaluation of different keyword extraction techniques

Retrieving keywords in a text is attracting researchers for a long time as it forms a base for many natural language applications like information retrieval, text summarization, document categorization etc. A text is a collection of words that represent the theme of the text naturally and to bring the naturalism under certain rules is itself a challenging task. In the present paper, the authors evaluate different spatial distribution based keyword extraction methods available in the literature on three standard scientific texts. The authors choose the first few high-frequency words for evaluation to reduce the complexity as all the methods are somehow based on frequency. The authors find that the methods are not providing good results particularly in the case of the first few retrieved words. Thus, the authors propose a new measure based on frequency, inverse document frequency, variance, and Tsallis entropy. Evaluation of different methods is done on the basis of precision, recall, and F-measure. Results show that the proposed method provides improved results.

Investigating disagreement in the scientific literature

Disagreement is essential to scientific progress but the extent of disagreement in science, its evolution over time, and the fields in which it happens remain poorly understood. Here we report the development of an approach based on cue phrases that can identify instances of disagreement in scientific articles. These instances are sentences in an article that cite other articles. Applying this approach to a collection of more than four million English-language articles published between 2000 and 2015 period, we determine the level of disagreement in five broad fields within the scientific literature (biomedical and health sciences; life and earth sciences; mathematics and computer science; physical sciences and engineering; and social sciences and humanities) and 817 meso-level fields. Overall, the level of disagreement is highest in the social sciences and humanities, and lowest in mathematics and computer science. However, there is considerable heterogeneity across the meso-level fields, revealing the importance of local disciplinary cultures and the epistemic characteristics of disagreement. Analysis at the level of individual articles reveals notable episodes of disagreement in science, and illustrates how methodological artifacts can confound analyses of scientific texts.

Abstractive Text Summary of COVID-19 Documents based on LSTM Method and Word Embedding

An abstractive summary is a process of producing a brief and coherent summary that contains the original text's main concepts. In scientific texts, summarization has generally been restricted to extractive techniques. Abstractive methods that use deep learning have proven very effective in summarizing articles in public fields, like news documents. Because of the difficulty of the neural frameworks for learning specific domain- knowledge especially in NLP task, they haven't been more applied to documents that are related to a particular domain such as the medical domain. In this study, an abstractive summary is proposed. The proposed system is applied to the COVID-19 dataset which a collection of science documents linked to the coronavirus and associated illnesses, in this work 12000 samples from this dataset have been used. The suggested model is an abstractive summary model that can read abstracts of Covid-19 papers then create summaries in the style of a single-statement headline. A text summary model has been designed based on the LSTM method architecture. The proposed model includes using a glove model for word embedding which is converts input sequence to vector forms, then these vectors pass through LSTM layers to produce the summary. The results indicate that using an LSTM and glove model for word embedding together improves the summarization system's performance. This system was evaluated by rouge metrics and it achieved (43.6, 36.7, 43.6) for Rouge-1, Rouge-2, and Rouge-L respectively.

Refugia. (Prze)trwanie transgatunkowych wspólnot miejskich /Refugia: The Survival of Urban Transspecies Communities

Refugia: The Survival of Urban Transspecies Communities encourages to us recognize the unexpected relations among species and to speculate about the possibility of their existence and development. It shows the need for care and support for multi-species urban communities by answering questions about the following: Which humans and non-humans may find refuge in the city? Under what conditions and to what extent? Are cities also becoming spaces of refuge for rare, endangered or endangered species and disappearing ecosystems? Can unwanted and underestimated life forms find refuge in the city, and how much compassion and hospitality do we have for them? Is it possible to be safe in the city without a place–home–shelter of one’s own? The book is the result of transdisciplinary research, including knowledge-producing artistic projects, whose research and communication methodology enable us to go beyond specialist circles. The book consists of two parts, the first of which, Refugia: The Transdisciplinary Practice of Curiosity, includes scientific texts focusing on various cases of interspecies relationships created in cities by human and non-human animals, plants, fungi, soil, architecture, etc. The second part of the book includes artistic statements in the form of visual documentation of projects created for the exhibition Refugia: Keep (Out of) These Places. The art presented here makes it possible to construct perspectives different from those generated in the field of humanities or sciences, but remaining in close contact with these fields.

Defining Pedagogical Differentiation in Higher Education

The purpose of this paper is, through content analysis of 19 publications in the Greek and international literature in scientific texts, books, journal articles, and conferences, to investigate the conceptual content of pedagogical differentiation in higher education, as it emerges from the descriptions and discussion of authors, researchers, and experts. From the analysis, twelve dimensions or characteristics of pedagogical differentiation emerged that presented the highest frequency of occurrence in four broad categories. These are a. modification of the supportive learning context, meeting the needs of learners, and continuous improvement of the learning for all the learners who joined the category entitled "processes", b. student-centered teaching and learning, flexible learning context / flexible grouping and the possibility of learning option / multiple options as dimensions of a more general category called "context", c. the success and active participation of the learner in his learning, the development of life skills as well as the development of procedural knowledge skills that were included in the category called "learning outcomes" and d. the modification of "learning" products, the alternative / modern forms of assessment and the continuous assessment that were dimensions of the category "assessment". The results of the research show that the dimension with the highest frequency is a modification of the supportive learning context and follows in order of frequency of occurrence, the modification of learning "products" and meeting the needs of learners. Finally, the dimensions with the lowest frequency of occurrence include the continuous assessment and the development of procedural knowledge skills.

Teachers’ Perspective on Scientific Literacy in Science Learning: Descriptive Survey

Survey of questionnaire-based research was conducted to assess the perspective of junior high school (JHS) science teachers on scientific literacy in science learning. Four perspectives for teachers in JHS on scientific literacy were obtained from the research results of the experiments, namely the reading of scientific texts, scientific knowledge, the use of science in everyday life and the use of science-based learning tools. The majority of participants chose the response choice to train all students to apply science learning results in decision-making on daily life challenges. Thus, JHS Science Teachers in Purwakata Regency have a variety of scientific literacy perspectives, but there is no perspective that is considered outside the context of scientific literacy

THE PECULIARITIES OF COMPILING THE “GERMAN-UKRAINIAN DICTIONARY OF TERMINOLOGY OF LIFE SAFETY”

The article deals with the principles of compiling the “German-Ukrainian Dictionary of Terminology of Life Safety” and selection pecularities of the lexical material such as the principles of compliance with the goals and objectives of learning, frequency, word-forming value of the term, associative value, subjectivity and semantics. Compilation of the dictionary involves many stages: analysis of existing dictionaries, research of the needs of the addressee, determination of requirements and future characteristics of the dictionary, development of its macro- and microstructure, collection of lexical material, design of dictionary articles, selection of translation equivalents, ordering of the dictionary in accordance with the developed structure, editing, checking the compliance of the received product with the set goals. The author offers the most productive and speed methods of compiling a dictionary with the help of BootCat generation program and Morphy program of paradigms synthesis, which allowed to single out 20,000 terms of the professional language of life safety in the shortest time and find their Ukrainian equivalents. The generation of a body of texts is carried out with S. Sharoff’s method, which provides the search for professional texts with the help of randomly combined four basic terms. This ensures the organization of a homogeneous selection of thematically related texts from the Internet (manuals, reference books, scientific articles, newspaper reports, instructions, sights, abstracts and annotations of articles, etc.). The obtained texts are processed with the help of the Morphy paradigm synthesis program, which automatically assigns all possible grammatical categories to each word in the sentence, and compiles the initial list of terminological dictionary. The next task is to provide equivalent words in the language of translation, able to accurately convey the semantics of the register word. Consequently, in the hands of the user of the dictionary, there is a certain linguistic model of the German professional language of life safety in its equivalent reproduction in the Ukrainian language. The presence of such an initial model will allow the user to perceive adequately scientific texts and, thus, successfully expand their scientific and conceptual apparatus in the future. Key words: dictionary, term, German professional language of life safety, terminological system, lexicography, synthesis of paradigms.