Semi-authentic practices for student health interpreters

This paper will briefly describe some pedagogical tools used to provide semi-authentic practices for trainee healthcare interpreters. Such practices facilitate legitimate peripheral participation by a Community of Learners in the Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998, 2000). Special emphasis will be placed on the importance of shared pre-professional practice, and two examples of this will be described in some detail. The pedagogical tools outlined in this paper can be easily replicated by interpreter educators internationally

Language shift and host society attitudes: Dutch migrants who arrived in New Zealand between 1950 and 1965

Language shift and host society attitudes - Dutch migrants who arrived in New Zealand between 1950 and 1965 Abstract A study published in 2010 reported on past and current language use of a group of older Dutch migrants in New Zealand. Respondents interviewed for the study consisted of 30 retired Dutch migrants, all of whom had arrived in New Zealand between 1950 and 1965 when they were aged between 18 and 35 years of age. All respondents were living in the Greater Auckland area and were aged between 65 and 92 at the time of the interview. All respondents were asked questions based on a sociolinguistic life questionnaire and asked about their language use and experiences since migration. Interviews were recorded and information from interviews and questionnaires was supplemented by data collected from participants’ adult children.This paper will focus on respondents’ comments in relation to their motivation to either maintain their L1 Dutch or shift to their L2 English in the home environment. It appeared that external societal attitudes affected respondents’ language use in a number of domains, including the home environment

Improving psychological skill in trainee interpreters

The general effects of self-efficacy and explanatory style on performance have been thoroughly researched in the field of psychology. This article is based on Atkinson’s (2012) psychological skill model, which attempts to construct these factors to complement traditional conceptions of interpreter and translator skill, and apply them to interpreter and translator training. This article is a discussion of psychological skill, including factors of self-efficacy, explanatory style, and locus of control, and outlines how self-efficacy and explanatory style can become a focus of interpreter training. Resources to help students conduct self-analysis on their occupational self-efficacy and explanatory style are provided in the appendices, in the form of scales educators can use in their classes. A range of ideas are highlighted to assist students in becoming aware of their psychological skill, and pedagogical suggestions are offered for changing and improving aspects of psychological skill in students

I understand it well, but I cannot say it proper back: language use among older Dutch migrants in New Zealand

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine two groups of healthy older Dutch English bilingual migrants in a New Zealand setting to investigate whether they were showing signs of L2 attrition with accompanying L1 reversion post-retirement, and (b) to identify possible factors which might play a role in the incidence of any L2 attrition and concomitant L1 reversion. Previous research has focused on similar groups of migrants in the Australian context, while New Zealand based research has focused on language shift and maintenance amongst three generations of migrants. The research design involved an analysis of sociolinguistic life, using questionnaires. These included self-assessments of L1 and L2 proficiency at three key times: on arrival in New Zealand, at time of ultimate attainment and post-retirement. Further, an analysis of assessments of respondents’ L1 and L2 proficiency pre-and post-retirement completed by interviewees’ adult children moderated respondents’ self-reports. The findings revealed a considerable overlap between participants’ self-reports and assessments by their adult children. The study also revealed a relationship between participants’ level of prior education and their ultimate attainment in the L2, with those who had come to New Zealand having learned English at Secondary School English very likely to have achieved a “good” or “very good” level of L2 proficiency. Conversely, those who had not learned the L2 at secondary school prior to arriving in New Zealand, were less likely to have achieved a “very good” level of ultimate attainment as evident both from self-reports and assessments by adult children. The design also included a linguistic analysis of elicited free speech. Data focused on key indicators of age, gender, social class, prior education, occupation and predominant linguistic environment pre- and post-retirement. Free speech was examined for code-switching, response latency and L1 structure in respondents’ spoken L2. Results indicated that a majority of respondents showed minimal if any signs of L2 attrition with concomitant L1 reversion, both as evidenced by their spoken L2 and as indicated by self-reports and assessments by adult children. Any signs of L2 attrition which were found appeared linked to respondents’ level of prior education and L2 proficiency on arrival in New Zealand. Being exposed to a predominantly L1 social environment post-retirement also appeared to result in a lifting of the threshold for L2 lexical items, resulting in a slightly increased response latency in the spoken L2. Three participants said they experienced some problems expressing their healthcare needs to medical professionals, to the extent that they were searching for words. All stated they “got there in the end” but needed more time to paraphrase their health needs. Two subjects avoided the use of the L2 during the interview, even when prompted in English. Three respondents engaged in significant codeswitching from L2 to L1 and vice versa, with two engaging in what Muysken (2000) terms “congruent lexicalisation”. Adult childrens’ reports indicated that the respondents in question had always spoken in this manner, but to a greater extent now, post-retirement. Overall, a number of the healthy older subjects interviewed for the study were showing some signs of increased response latency and lexical retrieval problems when expressing themselves in the L2, but none to the degree that they were no longer able to communicate in that language

Locoregional hyperthermia of deep-seated tumours applied with capacitive and radiative systems. A simulation study

Background: Locoregional hyperthermia is applied to deep-seated tumours in the pelvic region. Two very different heating techniques are often applied: capacitive and radiative heating. In this paper, numerical simulations are applied to compare the performance of both techniques in heating of deep-seated tumours. Methods: Phantom simulations were performed for small (30 × 20 × 50 cm 3 ) and large (45 × 30 × 50 cm 3 ), homogeneous fatless and inhomogeneous fat-muscle, tissue-equivalent phantoms with a central or eccentric target region. Radiative heating was simulated with the 70 MHz AMC-4 system and capacitive heating was simulated at 13.56 MHz. Simulations were performed for small fatless, small (i.e. fat layer typically 3 cm) patients with cervix, prostate, bladder and rectum cancer. Temperature distributions were simulated using constant hyperthermic-level perfusion values with tissue constraints of 44 °C and compared for both heating techniques. Results: For the small homogeneous phantom, similar target heating was predicted with radiative and capacitive heating. For the large homogeneous phantom, most effective target heating was predicted with capacitive heating. For inhomogeneous phantoms, hot spots in the fat layer limit adequate capacitive heating, and simulated target temperatures with radiative heating were 2–4 °C higher. Patient simulations predicted therapeutic target temperatures with capacitive heating for fatless patients, but radiative heating was more robust for all tumour sites and patient sizes, yielding target temperatures 1–3 °C higher than those predicted for capacitive heating. Conclusion: Generally, radiative locoregional heating yields more favourable simulated temperature distributions for deep-seated pelvic tumours, compared with capacitive heating. Therapeutic temperatures are predicted for capacitive heating in patients with (almost) no fat

Current state of the art of regional hyperthermia treatment planning: A review

Locoregional hyperthermia, i.e. increasing the tumor temperature to 40-45 °C using an external heating device, is a very effective radio and chemosensitizer, which significantly improves clinical outcome. There is a clear thermal dose-effect relation, but the pursued optimal thermal dose of 43 °C for 1 h can often not be realized due to treatment limiting hot spots in normal tissue. Modern heating devices have a large number of independent antennas, which provides flexible power steering to optimize tumor heating and minimize hot spots, but manual selection of optimal settings is difficult. Treatment planning is a very valuable tool to improve locoregional heating. This paper reviews the developments in treatment planning software for tissue segmentation, electromagnetic field calculations, thermal modeling and optimization techniques. Over the last decade, simulation tools have become more advanced. On-line use has become possible by implementing algorithms on the graphical processing unit, which allows real-time computations. The number of applications using treatment planning is increasing rapidly and moving on from retrospective analyses towards assisting prospective clinical treatment strategies. Some clinically relevant applications will be discussed

Thermal dosimetry for bladder hyperthermia treatment. An overview.

The urinary bladder is a fluid-filled organ. This makes, on the one hand, the internal surface of the bladder wall relatively easy to heat and ensures in most cases a relatively homogeneous temperature distribution; on the other hand the variable volume, organ motion, and moving fluid cause artefacts for most non-invasive thermometry methods, and require additional efforts in planning accurate thermal treatment of bladder cancer. We give an overview of the thermometry methods currently used and investigated for hyperthermia treatments of bladder cancer, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages within the context of the specific disease (muscle-invasive or non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer) and the heating technique used. The role of treatment simulation to determine the thermal dose delivered is also discussed. Generally speaking, invasive measurement methods are more accurate than non-invasive methods, but provide more limited spatial information; therefore, a combination of both is desirable, preferably supplemented by simulations. Current efforts at research and clinical centres continue to improve non-invasive thermometry methods and the reliability of treatment planning and control software. Due to the challenges in measuring temperature across the non-stationary bladder wall and surrounding tissues, more research is needed to increase our knowledge about the penetration depth and typical heating pattern of the various hyperthermia devices, in order to further improve treatments. The ability to better determine the delivered thermal dose will enable clinicians to investigate the optimal treatment parameters, and consequentially, to give better controlled, thus even more reliable and effective, thermal treatments

Teaching Interpreters About Self-Care

Personal factors as well as the nature of certain assignments may negatively impact interpreters and cause stress. The authors sought to examine the various stressors that affect interpreters. They argue that if interpreters are able to identify a potential stressor early on, they may be able to address it through self-care. In the worst-case scenario, ongoing and unaddressed negative impact may result in burnout, at which stage professional assistance will be required and there may be long-term consequences. The authors propose an approach aimed at helping interpreters recognize signs of being negatively impacted, as well as teaching them self-care techniques, so as to reduce the deleterious effects of the stressors they face

The Benefits of Reflective Blogs in Language-Neutral Translator Education

Abstract: This paper is based on anonymised information taken from online blogs created by students in a translation course taught at Auckland University of Technology (AUT University) as part of their assessment. Auckland is the main destination for entry for both new migrants and refugees and is therefore the dominant region for ethnic diversity. At present, the three main interpreting and translation services in the Auckland area cater to the communicative needs of migrants and refugees representing up to 200 different languages. Students taking this course reflect to some degree the range of ethnic and linguistic communities in the greater Auckland area. Over the past years, translation and interpreting classrooms at AUT have included speakers of Chinese languages, as well as Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Farsi and Vietnamese. This type of multilingual and multicultural classroom has required the development of special language-neutral pedagogies. The current paper describes the use of reflective blogs: students were asked to translate a range of texts involving a variety of culture-specific items (Aixelá, 1996; Davies, 2003) and to use the blogs to reflect on issues identified, resources used and reviewer feedback. The material chosen for translation included a range of texts commonly encountered in public service translation settings; the blog method employed may prove to be beneficial to (student) translators working in public service settings.Resumen: Este artículo está basado en información anonimizada extraída de blogs creados por estudiantes en una asignatura de traducción en la universidad Auckland University of Technology (AUT) como parte de su evaluación. Auckland es el centro con más ingreso de emigrantes y refugiados y de esta manera es la región líder en diversidad étnica. Actualmente, los tres servicios principales de traducción e interpretación en Auckland atienden las dificultades comunicativas de emigrantes y refugiados, representando hasta 200 distintos idiomas. Los estudiantes de esta materia reflejan en cierta medida la diversidad de comunidades étnicas y lingüísticas en la región de Auckland. Durante años, por las clases de traducción e interpretación en AUT han pasado estudiantes de habla coreana, japonesa, árabe, persa, vietnamita como también de dialectos chinos. Este tipo de clase multicultural y multilingüe ha requerido el desarrollo de pedagogías especiales en idioma neutro. Este artículo describe el uso de blogs reflexivos: se le pidió a los estudiantes traducir una variedad de textos que incluían distintos elementos específico-culturales (Aixéla 1996; Davies, 2003) y utilizar sus blogs para reflexionar sobre la identificación de problemas, recursos utilizados y comentarios de crítica de revisión. El material elegido incluyó una variedad de textos que pueden ser encontrados comúnmente en contextos de servicio de traducción publica y el método de blog empleado puede ayudar a (estudiantes) traductores que desempeñan su labor en contextos de servicios públicos.