Are there any studies on the role of translation technology in the context of regional linguistic minorities?

One of the goals of the scientific platforms, including Research Gate, is to help researchers to update their knowledge regarding the recent developments in research in their area of study. We can help new researchers by suggesting titles or topics for research and in this way we can promote spreading knowledge and it would be another way for connecting researchers all over the world. Moreover, some researchers may co-author some topics as well as brainstorm ideas in their areas. I'll start with some topics that might be interesting for some researchers in the field of "translation" and I expect others to contribute. Thanks a lot in advance for your contribution. And I think you will get lots of thanks from such researchers.

1.Metonymy as a pragmatic style for politeness in religious texts with reference to translation.

2. Naturalness in translation: advantages and disadvantages.

I want to do translation project about

- translation text between English to Hindi

- machine translation

- study about contrastive analysis from translated text etc.

I am not Hindi and English native speaker (I am Thai) but now i am studying translation course about Hindi and English in India. And I am Thinking about project.

I want to measure how easy/difficult a legal translated text is to a defendant whose only medium of reception of the text is the auditory channel. I am familiar with the Flesch readability formula but I was wondering if there are better ways to do it?

I am doing research on knowledge sharing and recently I got interested in sociolinguistics. I am struggling with differentiating between two possible perspectives (in my view) on language. One perspective on language can be perceiving it as a social factor, which can influence society in number of ways. This is more like a general way to conceptualize language where we do not focus on anything specific. Another perspective is to focus on language in action that is language use for example code switching, accommodation etc. First one seems to be more static view of language and second one is more dynamic. .

I would be very thankful if someone sheds light on this. Is there any way to explain this difference in proper words? Moreover what would be useful terms representing these so called perspectives. It would be also helpful if someone can refer me to relevant paper(s), which have in any way talked about this. 

In the '90, Ethiopian government tried to create an Esperanto-style language in the Wolaitta region by mixing four different languages: Wolaitta, Gamo, Gofa, Dawro. I need more material to understand the reaction of the Wolaitta's people and how this policy has been promoted and empowered by the government.

Merriam-Webster singles out non-binary 'they' for Word Of The Year Honors. As linguists, we all have long been familiar with neutral 'they/them/their' in academic writing, but 'themself' is quite interesting, and the neutral singular possessive 'theirs' is quite challenging as well as confusing. Nevertheless, gender-neutral pronouns are not new in world languages (e.g., third person pronoun in Persian has always been number-and-gender-neutral (which testifies to the fact that the Iranian culture/civilization has always considered men and women equal). Merriam-Webster's decision has its roots probably in a twit by Sam Smith (September 13, 2019), who wrote: "Today is a good day so here goes. I’ve decided I am changing my pronouns to THEY/THEM . . . after a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out . . . ." While I do see the motivation behind this instance of 'sociolinguistic lexical engineering' by Merriam-Webster, what keeps me--as a pragmaticist--in awe is the potential that this neutral 'they/them/theirs/their/themself' usage has for language aggression. As eerie as this new usage may be (as you will see in my next sentence), Sam Smith prefers 'they' over 'he' as a self-reference pronoun because they wants to suggest that they does not consider themself as a male or female. However, imagine that someone who strictly prefers he or she as a self-reference pronoun is 'aggressively' and 'intentionally' addressed as 'they' by a third party. I mean, this kind of 'sociolinguistic lexical engineering' (as I would like to refer to it) has a great potential for 'language aggression' when it is used to address someone who prefers 'he' for himself or 'she' for herself. In addition, this kind of 'sociolinguistic lexical engineering' entails drastic changes in literature, general writing, grammar, and even in civil law. If I were in charge at Merriam-Webster, I would go for a whole new coinage for third person singular (e.g., *sey/*sem/*seir/*seirs/*semself--or something similar to these). We should not forget that English third person singular pronoun and its cognates encode both 'gender' and 'number', and that replacing it by a neutralized-and-singularized 'they' is quite confusing and cognitively-demanding for language learners and native speakers alike. Do you agree with me on this point? Your comments will help this forum to evolve.

Thank you very much.

Mohammad Ali Salmani Nodoushan

I'm often very skeptical about the language decisions and policies issued by governments or self-proclaimed language authorities to control the way people use language. Nevertheless, I'm just curious to know if there is evidence for the (partial or full) success of such a top-down approach in some contexts.