Zentrum für Translationswissenschaften

Since the transition to its own translation program in 2015, machine translation on the social network Facebook has been an omnipresent feature for the 1.52 billion users. By experimenting with new techniques and using a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), the social network stands out clearly from others of its kind. To further evaluate this modern translation strategy, the master thesis deals with the question of how satisfied the Facebook users are with the quality of these machine-generated translations and whether they can compete with professionally produced translations. Here, the main emphasis was put on the translation of colloquial language. In addition, the user-friendliness, as well as other features of the Facebook translator, will be discussed in more detail. A total of 100 different opinions were obtained in the form of an online population survey. The results of this survey indicate that the quality of the Facebook translator is still far from a professional translat...

As videogames are set to become the dominant pop-cultural medium of the 21st century, this paper aims to provide approaches to a critical reading of Bethesda’s Fallout 4, informed by perspectives of cultural studies. Tracing arguments from the fronts of the ludology/narratology debate, this paper adds the conception of videogames as commodities of a culture industry to provide a critical perspective on the meanings and ideologies negotiated in Fallout 4, one of the most successful games of the last decade. Drawing from various theoretical approaches, salient narrative and ludic aspects of the games are investigated. Among them is the game’s plot, its nostalgic retrofuturistic aesthetic, its ruins and ecology as evocative spaces, its stylization of the gameworld as frontier through its mechanics, and tangible neoliberal ideologies present in its levelling system. Ultimately, it is shown that Fallout 4 is a game negotiating US history and its present. While the engagement with history, most notably the Revolutionary War and slavery, relies on ironic detachment and celebratory excess, its engagement with the present hints on resting anxieties with legacies of slavery and pollution.

The following is a case study of manual annotation as used in a large-scale variationist linguist project focusing of spoken varieties of German in Austria. It showcases the technical architecture used for annotation, which unifies different granularities of tokenization through the corpus in a distinct entity designed for annotation. It furthermore lays out the hierarchical stand-off annotation used in the project Deutsch in Österreich ("German in Austria") and demonstrates how a semantic model for the hierarchical organization of annotations can bring transparency to the annotation process while also providing a sounder epistemological basis than monodimensional annotation.

Abstract: Due to a concatenation of events, such as becoming member of World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and holding the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, as well as the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, China was suddenly thrust into the limelight and received massive exposure. Determined not to miss such a wonderful chance to rise to prominence as a modern state, fully integrated into a globalized world, the People’s Republic of China embarked upon an intensive ESL Program, meant to enable her population to communicate with the thousands of tourists who were expected and who were, under no circumstances, to be displeased. By providing different perspectives of various scholars, the present paper aims at analyzing the impact that the study of English language has and is apt to have upon China in terms of culture, politics and economy, depending on what course of action it will adopt.
Keywords: Chinglish, China English, ESL, China, culture, direction.

The aim of this master's thesis is to provide a useful contribution to dialogue interpreting didactics. At present, the didactics in this field frequently follows the firm principle of neutrality and rigid turn taking patterns. Furthermore, the focus is on (the lack of) linguistic quality. Thus, dialogue interpreting classes provide little space for the targeted use of nonverbal communication and proxemics, for raising (professional) self-awareness and self-confidence, trying out different action alternatives, positioning between identification and distancing, creating one's own solutions for translation and communicative issues or confronting the students with ethical questions. As the last-mentioned aspects are vital parts of community interpreters' daily work, they deserve (far) more attention during training. In order to achieve this goal, the present thesis suggests an interdisciplinary approach: the fusion of theatre pedagogy and dialogue interpreting didactics. Th...

During the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, there was an observable increase in social and political attention paid to gender-based violence in our national context. This, in turn, has highlighted the important role of the Austrian Violence Protection Centres, also revealing the need to facilitate easier access to these services for non-German speaking clients through interpreters. To find ways to mirror close-to-life situations in our interpreting classes that reflect current technological developments, acute societal issues and complex institutional contexts, we developed a research-led semi-structured role-play concept, with the goal of preparing students for technical, ethical and emotional challenges pertaining to remote interpreting in sensitive contexts. To validate the effectiveness of the role-play, we used two simulations of interpreter-mediated online counselling sessions and conducted post-task interviews with involved students acting as in...