MAIN DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING CONTRACTUAL DOCUMENTATION (ENGLISH/RUSSIAN)

The article is devoted to one of the most common translation problems in the sphere of law, namely finding the adequate equivalents in vocabulary, especially it concerns foreign terminology, in grammar and in text structure.While it is well-known that equivalence is one of the key concepts in translation, the research on practical applications of this principle in different professional spheres is still limited. With the rise of the interest to the machine translation, the special attention to the most common translation problems in the sphere of law can contribute to the overall understanding of the translation process. The methodological approach taken in this study is a mixed methodology based on comparative, structural, socio-linguistic and socio-cultural aspects of translation. The material presented in the article is based on the original contracts developed in English and Russian for the major oil and gas projects to be implemented in Russia 2006-2009. The examples of vocabulary, grammar and text structures equivalents can show the reasons for emergence of the main translation difficulties - polysemantic structure of some terms, absence of concept in either language, dependence of the meaning of the term on the context, idiomatic expressions, historically established traditions in legal text formation – emphasizing the idea that equivalence principle should be considered as a priority when translating contractual documentation.

Coordinate Systems and Vectors

This chapter introduces the various types of coordinate systems that exist in three dimensions and develops the basic concept of ‘metric’ to describe their properties. It introduces vectors in these coordinate systems and develops the notions of the ‘index language,’ dependence on the metric, and the covariance of vectors. Early familiarity with the metric tensor, index or component notation, symmetric and anti-symmetric manipulation is intended.

Differential Object Marking in Tuvan language: dependence on the function and nature of the definition

For the Tuvan language, factors influencing Differential Object Marking remain uncovered despite extensive studies on the topic. This is due to the numerous cases of forms of the primary and accusative cases of the direct object replacing each other without noticeably changing the meaning of the sentence. Thus, it is necessary to elucidate all the causes of variation and establish their interactions. The current study focuses on the dependence of the direct object labeling on the function and the nature of the definition in the Tuvan language. The paper highlights the interaction of semantic, syntactic, communicative, and pragmatic factors influencing the choice of labeling. The analysis revealed that the direct object with the definition as a whole does not require a case. Firstly, the semantics of definition occupies a decisive place, as in the case of indexical pronouns (as a means of expressing anaphoric and deictic meanings). Secondly, the communicative role of the defined object in the utterance is of significance. The definition acts as a link between the object defined and the previous reference to that object, indicating information about the object that is already familiar to the addressee. Thirdly, discursive factors are distinct and important, including the speaker’s intention to clarify the referent or generalize by different means the meaning of the referent in the discourse depending on his or her goal. Thus, the referential properties of definitions alone do not allow unambiguously predicting the labeling of the nominal group.

Transition based neural network dependency parsing of Tibetan

In order to improve the performance of Tibetan natural language processing applications such as machine translation, sentiment analysis and other tasks, this article proposes a neural network-based method for syntactic analysis of Tibetan language dependence. Part of the corpus of Qinghai Normal University’s part-of-speech tag set is marked by the corresponding mapping relationship is transformed into the corpus annotated by the national standard part-of-speech tag set. At the same time, the CoNLL format Tibetan language dependency syntax tree library is constructed, and the method of shift-reduce plus neural network is adopted to systematically study and analyze the Tibetan language dependency syntax. Thereby improving the quality of Tibetan dependency syntactic analysis, and its accuracy rate reaches UAS:94.59%

Rebooting discourse ethics

In this article I argue that the conception of discourse ethics that Jürgen Habermas advances in his seminar paper, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification’, is subject to significant revision in later work. The central difference has to do with the status of the universalization principle and its relationship to the ‘rightness’ validity claim. The earlier view is structured by a desire to provide a weak-transcendental defense of the universalization principle. The later revision, however, essentially undercuts the basis of this argument, because it severs the conception of practical discourse from the analysis of speech acts. As a way of responding to the difficulties this creates, I propose a ‘reboot’ of the discourse ethics program. This involves reverting to the earlier, more Durkheimian and less Kantian, formulation of the theory. The result is a program that is no longer encumbered by sterile debates about the correct formulation of the universalization principle, but can plausibly claim to provide insight into the role that language-dependence plays in the development and entrenchment of increasingly pro-social behavior patterns within our institutions.