Literalization in the self-revision process of novice and experienced biomedical translators

This paper explores decision-making in translation focusing on the self-revision process of novice and experienced translators of biomedical content in the English to European Portuguese language pair. Adopting process- and product-oriented methods, an experiment was designed to study thirty translations of a 244-word instructional text about a medical device intended for health professionals. The data elicited from fifteen novice translators and fifteen experienced translators included keylogging and screen-recording data. These data were triangulated and analyzed to describe the translation solutions in the interim and final versions in response to problematic translation units and to test if, during the self-revision process, novice and experienced translators tend to proceed from more literal versions to less literal ones, or vice versa, in biomedical translation. Contrary to expectations, the analysis points towards a literalization phenomenon in the translators’ processes. The data also indicates that the tendency to proceed from less literal versions to more literal ones is more pronounced in novice translators than in experienced translators. The findings reported here shed new light on the self-revision processes of novice and experienced translators and their relationship with prevailing translation norms, and enable us to better understand the practices in place in professional biomedical translation.

Review: Creative Commons. (2020). Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians. Chicago: ALA Editions. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1946-0.

This article reviews the book "Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians," a guide to the application of the Creative Commons system for open access licenses. In addition to providing an assessment of the book as an instructional text in critical skills of copyright and licensing applications among librarians and educators, it discusses pedagogical features of the text and gives a brief overview of its content.

Does increasing social presence enhance the effectiveness of writing explanations?

Writing explanations has demonstrated to be less effective than providing oral explanations, as writing triggers less amounts of perceived social presence during explaining. In this study, we investigated whether increasing social presence during writing explanations would aid learning. University students (N = 137) read an instructional text about immunology; their subsequent task depended on experimental condition. Students either explained the contents to a fictitious peer orally, wrote their explanations in a text editor, or wrote them in a messenger chat, which was assumed to induce higher levels of social presence. A control group retrieved the material. Surprisingly, we did not obtain any differences in learning outcomes between experimental conditions. Interestingly, explaining was more effortful, enjoyable, and interesting than retrieving. This study shows that solely inducing social presence does not improve learning from writing explanations. More importantly, the findings underscore the importance of cognitive and motivational conditions during learning activities.

Reading instructions of the past, classifying them, and reclassifying them: commentaries on the canon The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures from the third to the thirteenth centuries

This essay approaches the knowledge required to write up and use instructions with a specific method. It relies on specific procedures taken from the Chinese canon The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures (九章算術), which, in the author's view, was completed in the first century CE. These procedures enabled readers to do things. To analyse the type of knowledge required to produce these texts of procedures and to use them, the essay puts into play two layers of commentary. The ancient layer was written between the third and the seventh centuries, whereas the later layer was composed between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. The author shows that these two layers of commentary read the same text of procedure differently, using different approaches and understanding it differently. The author also shows how the two layers of commentary use mathematical problems to approach a procedure, even though problems are used differently in the two contexts. This illustrates how, in different contexts, actors interpreted the same instructional text differently, both with respect to what the text meant and with respect to how one could make sense of it.

Textbook Readibility Assessment of K13 English Textbook For Twelfth Grade

English textbook for twelfth grade of SMA which is published by Ministry of Education and Culture is a compulsory textbook which is based on national curriculum 2013 to support education in Indonesia. This study aims to investigate the readability level of the English textbook. It uses descriptive quantitative method to examine the readability of this book. The data are in the form of texts derives from transactional and interpersonal text, short functional text, reading text, instructional text inside the book. There are 180 data taken from those four texts. They are analyzed by using Miyazaki EFL readability formulae as a tool to measure the readability level whether it is suitable or not for twelfth grade students. According to Miyazaki EFL readability test, the easiest text from the book is in 5th grade and the hardest one is in post-school/university grade. But the most frequent grade appear in this book is in 8th and 9th grade which is 77 data (texts). The average of this book score is 63.2 which means it is suitable for 8th and 9th grade. This book is too easy for twelfth grade according to Miyazaki EFL readability test.