Academic Writing for Publication Purposes and Machine Translation: Is the Symbiosis Possible?

The abstracts in Russian and in English are written according to certain rules. For articles written in Russian, an abstract in English is the only means of informing the world scientific community about the authors’ research results. However, the quality of abstracts written in Russian and then translated into English does not always meet the criteria for readability and comply with the accepted academic and publication conventions. This situation might result from the intensive usage of machine translation (MT) systems by authors who do not take into account the guidelines for the input text quality and the limitations inherent in MT systems. The author analyzed the requirements for the input texts and some typical errors in the target ones. The article describes the stages of training masters, postgraduate students and university staff in the effective use of MT systems. The training is based on a bilingual approach, which implies a constant comparison of vocabulary, grammar and style in the native and English languages. The author comes to the conclusion that the effective use of MT systems for writing an abstract in English is possible if the authors have the command of Russian and English at the level sufficient for a concise and unambiguous expression of their thoughts and ideas. Self-censoring is a prerequisite for creating a text that is “understandable” for MT systems. Students must follow simple rules: write sentences of 15-20 words; express one thought per one sentence; use more active verbs; choose nouns that express a specific concept; exclude unnecessary words. At the post-editing stage, learners can use the tools available on the Internet, which allow not only editing the target text, but also will enable learners to acquire independent editing skills.

A Study of Cohesion in the Chinese Legal Text: Based on Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China

This study analyzes the textual cohesion of Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China from the perspective view of Cohesion Theory. According to the data analysis, the study indicates that, in this legal text, the means of cohesion occurs totally 792 times, among which grammatical cohesion takes a large proportion, that is, 83.9%, while lexical cohesion takes the ration of 16.1%. In the lexical cohesion, the repetition is used much more frequently, followed by the means of hyponymy/meronymy, synonymy/antonymy and collocation, taking the ratio of 0.8%, 0.5% and 0.4% respectively. Thus, we can know from the statistics that cohesion is an important feature of the Chinese legal text. It connects the syntactic grammar and the lexicons into together closely in the Chinese legal Articles. Therefore, the paper points out that a proper understanding of the cohesive devices in the Chinese legal text is significant to legal draftsmen and social scientists in the field of language and the law, for they might improve the text quality of their work with it.

Peer Review Declaration

All papers published in this volume (IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science) have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the Editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal published by IOP Publishing. • Type of peer review: Single-anonymous: authors’ identities are known to the reviewers, reviewers’ identities are hidden from authors. Main criteria used by Reviewers when accepting/declining papers: 1. Relevance to the scope of the Conference 2. Suitability & length of the title 3. Scientific originality 4. Adequacy of the abstract 5. Scientific quality 6. Text quality 7. English level • Conference submission management system: Full paper submission was fully managed by editorial board of Conference • Number of submissions received: 53 full papers • Number of submissions sent for review: 51 full papers • Number of submissions accepted: 48 full papers • Acceptance Rate (Number of Submissions Accepted/Number of Submissions Received X 100): 90.56 % • Average number of reviews per paper: 2 (117 reviews) • Total number of reviewers involved: 51 reviewers (15 institutes) from 3 countries • Any additional info on review process: The review process and revision were conducted 3 rounds on average for each paper since the first submission after presentation at the conference. The first step was to check the format of paper and base quality of English level. The second-round of review was organized for papers with minor remarks from reviewers, for example the graphics or style. The third round required only for papers that need major modifications (scientific discussion on topic). All reviewers were asked to complete the review within enough time ranged no more than three weeks. We have asked authors to revise according to suggestions by reviewers within time ranged between 7-10 days. After being accepted, the final English proofread and format checking our specialists were carried out to ensure the quality prior to submission to IOP EES. • Contact person for queries: Name: Aleksandr Zakupin, Ph.D. Affiliation: Institute for Marine Geology and Geophysics, Department of Seismology Email: [email protected]

A Discourse Coherence Analysis Method Combining Sentence Embedding and Dimension Grid

Discourse coherence is strongly associated with text quality, making it important to natural language generation and understanding. However, existing coherence models focus on measuring individual aspects of coherence, such as lexical overlap, entity centralization, rhetorical structure, etc., lacking measurement of the semantics of text. In this paper, we propose a discourse coherence analysis method combining sentence embedding and the dimension grid, we obtain sentence-level vector representation by deep learning, and we introduce a coherence model that captures the fine-grained semantic transitions in text. Our work is based on the hypothesis that each dimension in the embedding vector is exactly assigned a stated certainty and specific semantic. We take every dimension as an equal grid and compute its transition probabilities. The document feature vector is also enriched to model the coherence. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on two coherence-related tasks.

THE ROLE OF GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN THE TEXT QUALITY AMONG JORDANIAN EFL STUDENTS IN EXPOSITORY ESSAYS

The present paper shares interest that many scholars and linguists have highlighted in investigating the relationship between writing quality and grammatical cohesion devices. The aim of this study is to find out the relationship between the use of grammatical cohesive devices on the overall quality of expository essays produced by EFL fourth-year undergraduate students majoring in the English language at the Department of English language and literature Hashemite University in Jordan. It seeks to determine the efficacy of academic writing by Jordanian EFL students. Thirty purposive samples of compositions were collected and analyzed by the researcher to measure the relationship between the score of the writing quality and the grammatical cohesion devices in students' writing based on (1) analytical scale Jacob et al., (1981), and (2) Halliday and Hasan (1976) taxonomy of grammatical cohesion. The results showed that grammatical cohesive devices did not constitute a statistically significant correlation with the score of writing quality. It also revealed that the EFL students' written compositions were not successful due to their incapability to utilize the different forms of grammatical cohesive devices and their lack of knowledge about effectively using these devices in their academic writing.

Apology of the Ukrainian Kantiana: a critique of the nihilistic critique of the first Ukrainian-language “Critique”

The article deals with the review of the Ukrainian translation of "Critique of Pure Reason" (CPR) from the previous issue of the magazine. The publication of I. Ivashchenko and V. Terletsky tries to prove the thesis of unsatisfactory quality of translation – the article proves the failure of this attempt. It is shown that most of the reviewers' remarks are untenable, and, most importantly, the presented material is highly insufficient to prove their thesis. Unsatisfactory text quality means not just the presence of errors in it, but their high frequency. For an expansive text, a demonstration on a representative sample is required (its approximate format is offered) – there is nothing similar in the review. Some of its remarks are terminological, which may mean high-frequency errors, due to the repetition of certain terms, but in fact the valid points of those remarks are to point out a few omissions and variability in the translation of some less important terms. The review states that the terms should be translated "everywhere in the same way", while the use of a synonym causes, and inevitably, "the destruction of the structure of the argument". The first assertion is applicable with limitations, especially in the case of CPR, which is not characterized by terminological scrupulousness, and the second is a great exaggeration. The reviewers did not demonstrate any such grave consequences of the synonymy of the terms. In fact, the review proves only that there are flaws in the translation – but this is natural, they are in any translation, in the Ukrainian one they were additionally caused by the unfavorable conditions in which it was made. To neutralize these errors, it is to develop and distribute a list of amendments to the text.