Socio-technical issues in professional translation practice

Previously published in Translation Spaces 6:1 (2017)According to the International Ergonomics Association, a focus on organizational ergonomics recognizes that people work within socio-technical systems that encompass tools, equipment, and computer interfaces as well as other actors in their professional environment and networks. In recent research, we have started investigating such socio-technical factors from an ergonomic perspective. Observations at professional workplaces, responses to questionnaires, and indepth interviews with translators suggest that their perceived self-determination is more important to the success of socio-technical change than the technological developments themselves. A lack of involvement in decision-making at the workflow level may explain why so many translators have been resistant to taking new technology on board. We discuss how a feedback culture could mitigate many socio-technical issues by giving translators a voice in change and empowering them to contribute to organizational learning and growth

Dealing with structural patterns of XML documents

Evaluating collections of XML documents without paying attention to the schema they were written in may give interesting insights into the expected characteristics of a markup language, as well as any regularity that may span vocabularies and languages, and that are more fundamental and frequent than plain content models. In this paper we explore the idea of structural patterns in XML vocabularies, by examining the characteristics of elements as they are used, rather than as they are defined. We introduce from the ground up a formal theory of 8 plus 3 structural patterns for XML elements, and verify their identifiability in a number of different XML vocabularies. The results allowed the creation of visualization and content extraction tools that are completely independent of the schema and without any previous knowledge of the semantics and organization of the XML vocabulary of the documents