The phraseology of wine and olive oil tasting notes

Specialized genres are bound to the communicative context of their discourse community. However, certain genres extend beyond one specific domain, remaining unchanged at different linguistic levels across domains. That seems to be the case of wine and olive oil tasting notes since both analyze and evaluate sensory descriptions. The present study aims at describing and comparing lexical chunks of wine and olive oil tasting notes at a semantic level to show if there is variation in the same genre across domains; we will not only describe, classify and compare lexical chunks, but also identify the way this knowledge is structured and construed in the same genre in both domains. We will test our methodology in a corpus of English tasting notes from both genres written by three different writer profiles: professionals, amateurs and wineries/mills. Our results will be useful for scholars as well as technical writers when writing tasting notes.

La extracción de conocimiento y terminología a partir de corpus ad hoc: el uso de documentos digitales de la web pública

Electronic communication accelerates the exchange of knowledge and information in areas of specialized knowledge. This state of affairs forces anyone involved in such communication (e.g. technical writers, technical translators) to remain up to date with new developments. Not only do professionals belonging to this group of people have to master the standard terminology of each specialized domain, they must also assimilate and understand the subject matter within which they are working. This article proposes a method for assembling and using specific corpora with a view to extracting from them systematic and bilingual knowledge relating to terminology, the conceptual relations between terms, and the knowledge that they represent. Special attention is devoted to the strategies that will enable professionals to use such corpora in English and in Spanish.

Cultural Awareness and Distance Communication

This chapter reflects upon technology-mediated projects used to discuss and foster cultural awareness and proposes a methodology to be implemented in international, educational environments where communication could easily be hindered by cultural dissimilarities leading to conflict. More specifically, it seeks to answer two main questions, namely, whether technology is an aid or an obstacle in effective communication between students that never meet face-to-face and which obstacles, generated by technology-mediated communication in virtual teams, affect the intended outcome and how. These questions were raised during the participation of the authors of the chapter over a number of years in the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project, where the complex process of learning-by-doing was achieved through peer interaction and the completion of realistic collaborative activities performed by North American and Portuguese students, prospect technical writers, and translators, respectively.

CROSS-CULTURAL VARIATION IN THE EXPRESSION OF PERSUASIVE POWER IN THE GENRE OF TECHNICAL MANUALS: THE CASE OF DIRECTIVES

The paper provides a cross-cultural analysis of selected linguistic realizations of persuasion in technical manuals as typical representatives of technical discourse. It aims to identify differences and similarities between the ways persuasive power is expressed in this type of specialized discourse in English and Czech L1 texts. The data comprises manuals to various technical devices and amounts to slightly more than 200,000 words. This specialized corpus (15 manuals in English and 15 in Czech) is assumed to enable the comparison of the ways in which technical communicators express persuasion. The investigation, which is conducted from the perspectives of corpus analysis and discourse analysis, focuses on the ways in which the interactive and dynamic process of persuasion is explicitly manifested: 1. directly (i.e. using directives expressed by imperatives of full verbs, modals of obligation, necessity, prohibition, and predicative adjectives expressing the writer’s judgement of the necessity to perform an action) and 2. indirectly (i.e. using other language means than directives, such as other modals than those related to obligation, necessity or prohibition, conditional clauses, rhetorical questions). The findings are expected to be relevant and applicable in the education domain to raise technical writers’ awareness of directives as useful persuasive strategies suitable for the production of effective well-written technical manuals since their quality including the appropriate degree of persuasiveness can influence prospective consumers to make a purchase of a particular technical device.

Transatlantic Quechuañol: Reading Race through Colonial Translations

Translation is often described with opposed terms like loyalty and betrayal, even though the work of translation defies such a description. New research in translation studies argues for the value of mistranslation and untranslatables, especially in recovering Indigenous knowledge production. This study joins these efforts by documenting how technical writers in the colonial Andes used Quechua terms to form a patois called “Quechuañol” (Quechua plus español) and how this hybrid Andean language was obscured in translations of scientific texts in early modern England, Germany, and France. As translators reinterpreted metallic classifications in Quechuañol, including “Pacos, Mulatos y Negrillos” (“paco, mulato, and negrillo metals”), they chose terms that communicated their own, culturally specific ideas about color and categories. Tracing mistranslations in the Atlantic world allows us to document both the Indigenous intellectual contributions to the technical arts and the development of early modern racial classifications.

Testing the Test: Expanding the Dialogue on Technical Writing Assessment in the Academy and Workplace

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn from them is the unsatisfactory number of recent graduates who display workplace readiness. In this article, we explore writing assessment research in both the academy and the workplace and attempt to identify ways in which the academy’s assessment practices lead, lag behind, or simply differ from writing assessment in the workplace. This comparison will serve to identify not only where the academy might improve pedagogy in its curriculum for technical communication in order to best prepare students for workplace writing but also where the workplace might learn from the academy to improve its own hiring and training procedures for technical writers. In this case study, we used Neff’s approach to grounded theory to categorize rater feedback according to a ranking system and then used statistical analysis to compare writer performance. We found that the direct test method yields the most predictive results when raters combine tacit knowledge with a clearly defined rubric. We hope that the methods used in this study can be replicated in future studies to yield further results when exploring workplace genres and what they might teach us about our own pedagogical practice.