Language Interpretation and Translation Commons^™

Parallel Concepts Found In The Thousand And One Nights And Sufi Hagiography, Walaa Kamal Emam Kamel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that The Thousand and One Nights functions as more than mere populist entertainment; rather, it constitutes a literary corpus imbued with Sufi mystical epistemologies that reflect the spiritual quests and Sufi concepts evident in hagiographical traditions. Through discourse and intertextual analysis of two Nights stories, “The City of Brass” and “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” alongside Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, this study demonstrates how shared rhetorical strategies—specifically David Pinault’s Leitwörter analysis and L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience concept—reveal a narrative and rhetorical emphasis on the metamorphosis of the self from worldly attachment toward …

Navigating Trauma: A Linguistic Exploration Of Bilingual Trauma Expressions, Amira Mahmoud Othman

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the relationship between language, trauma, and emotional expression among bilingual Arabic-English speakers, focusing on code-switching patterns and euphemisms, and more broadly the emotional roles of native and non-native languages in trauma narratives. Through qualitative interviews with 20 Egyptian participants, the research reveals that code-switching serves as both a linguistic and emotional tool, allowing speakers to navigate trauma by creating distance or engaging more intimately. Such codeswitching patterns include the integration of English content words within Arabic structures, morphosyntactic innovations, and gender agreement applications, reflecting the creative adaptability of bilingual speakers in emotionally charged contexts, in line with …

From Ink To Code, From Binary To Boundless Reality—Until All Returns To Emptiness, Weitong Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the entangled relationship between language, memory, and technology through the lens of immigrant experience. Moving from programming to visual storytelling, I investigate how dyslexia, bilingualism, and cultural displacement have shaped my ways of reading, writing, and coding.

Beginning with personal reflections on switching from computer science to art, I trace how code offered a form of clarity and expression where written language had once failed me. Yet as I ventured into real-time simulation and XR storytelling, I encountered new forms of mistranslation—where narratives dissolved, mutated, or resisted coherence altogether.

Through a series of experiments in code-driven art, …

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.

Intertextualidad Y Cultura En La Traducción Literaria De Gods Of Jade And Shadow Por Silvia Moreno-García, Mayra Can

Theses and Dissertations

Language and culture are inextricably connected. This bond represents a constant challenge for translators. Novels and other literary texts add intertextuality to the mix, often complicating the linguistic transmission of all the pertinent elements from the source text to the target text. Current translation theories by Katharina Reiss, Lawrence Venuti, Christiane Nord, among others, offer analyses, explanations, strategies, and techniques to meet the challenges.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a faithful, idiomatic, and authoritative English to Spanish translation of three selected chapters of Gods of Jade and Shadow, a historical fantasy novel by Mexican-Canadian writer Silvia …

El Nuevo Cuento Latinoamericano: El ‘Terror Aparente Y Externo’ Versus El ‘Terror Real E Interno’ En Pelea De Gallos Y Grita De María Fernanda Ampuero, Y Las Voladoras De Mónica Ojeda, Alejandra Anahi Gaeta

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focusses on the new Latin-American short story; the ‘obvious and external horror’ vs. the ‘real and internal horror’ found in the works of Maria Fernanda Ampuero: Pelea de gallos (2018) and Grita (2020) as well as in Monica Ojeda’s Las voladoras (2020). The analysis encompasses situations that different protagonists experience in each short story to illustrate the message that the Ecuadorian writers intend to address the reader. Ampuero and Ojeda use their platform to expose the injustice that women and minors endure through their Latin American narratives. In the short stories that belong to the horror and the …

Translation In And Of Philosophy, Hussein Barrada

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Ricoeur in his essay The Paradigm of Translation, presents an understanding of translation that is found between two positions that are irreconcilable. These two positions represent on the one hand, the difference that exists between languages and on the other hand, the common ground that languages must have for them to be translatable into one another. Following Ricoeur’s paradigm, the thesis will aim to unpack an understanding of translation as a tension that occurs between its theoretical impossibility and the reality of its everyday practice. The theoretical impossibility of translation lies in the fact that for one language …

Yolkkh: The Story Of My People, Amna Zelimkha Yandarbin

Theses and Dissertations

The name of my project is: Yolkkh, The Story of My People. With this project I present a series of scarves each one bearing an illustrated scene in order to tell a story – my story and the story of the Noxci people. Noxci are the people who are referred to as “Chechens” by Russians and are generally known by that title. As a Muslim, I have witnessed the way Western media tend to dehumanize my community. In order to contrast this dehumanizing process, I thought that telling the story of my family would help reverse Islamophobic tendencies and raise …

Parallel Pattern: A Familial Legacy Of Care, Diana Antohe

Theses and Dissertations

My work revolves around exploring identity of the in-between, occupying the Venn diagram middle of two cultures. As a Romanian-born, American-raised artist, I want to preserve and broadcast links to the cultures of my upbringing and birthplace. In attempts to ground and define my own “in-between” identity, I look to my parents and grandparents for cues on how they made home for themselves wherever they went, reflecting their experiences with voluntary and involuntary displacement. This text connects the research and influential family practices that shaped its companion exhibition, ranging from the role of portability in emotional transnationalism to the lasting …

Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to find ways to improve the performance of a statistical machine translation system that translates text from Japanese to English. Methods included altering the training and test data by adding a prior linguistic knowledge, altering sentence structures, and looking for better ways to statistically alter the way words align between the two languages. In addition, methods for properly segmenting words in Japanese text through statistical methods were examined. Finally, experiments were conducted on Japanese speech to produce the best text transcription of the speech. The best statistical machine translation methods implemented resulted in improvements …

Multilingual Phoneme Models For Rapid Speech Processing System Development, Eric G. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Current speech recognition systems tend to be developed only for commercially viable languages. The resources needed for a typical speech recognition system include hundreds of hours of transcribed speech for acoustic models and 10 to 100 million words of text for language models; both of these requirements can be costly in time and money. The goal of this research is to facilitate rapid development of speech systems to new languages by using multilingual phoneme models to alleviate requirements for large amounts of transcribed speech. The Global Phone database, winch contains transcribed speech from 15 languages, is used as source data …

Speech Recognition Using The Mellin Transform, Jesse R. Hornback

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to improve performance in speech recognition. Specifically, a new approach was investigating by applying an integral transform known as the Mellin transform (MT) on the output of an auditory model to improve the recognition rate of phonemes through the scale-invariance property of the Mellin transform. Scale-invariance means that as a time-domain signal is subjected to dilations, the distribution of the signal in the MT domain remains unaffected. An auditory model was used to transform speech waveforms into images representing how the brain "sees" a sound. The MT was applied and features were extracted. The …

Improving The Quality Of Machine Translations By Providing Stylistic Guidelines To Authors And Editors, Edward J. Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

This research sought to identify stylistic guidelines which could be used by the authors and editors of English language texts in order to improve the quality of subsequent machine translations to other languages. A literature review was conducted to provide background information and to determine what guidelines would be appropriate. Nine guidelines were developed on the basis of the review. The guidelines were then tested. They were applied to five paragraphs from a Royal Australian Air Force technical publication by the researcher and an independent volunteer. Both the resulting texts and the original paragraphs were translated into French using the …

Seeing The Palm Trees Again, Jie Wang

Theses and Dissertations

A translation, analysis, and commentary on Seeing the Palm Trees Again, a highly regarded novel in contemporary Chinese fiction by Chinese-American novelist Lihua Yu, are presented. The novel is about a trip home by a professor of Chinese who has lived in the United States for ten years. It depicts the attitude of common Chinese people toward sending their children to America. It also describes the life of Chinese students in the United States. In creating the character of Tianlei Moe, the author has said what many people in Tianlei's situation feel but are reluctant to express openly: the feeling …