Making Sense
Narrative Sense of Scents: Linguistic Expression of the Olfactory Perception
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hamid Asiayee
To convey perceptual experiences, cognitive agents employ various verbal strategies. This paper's primary focus is on how olfactory perceptions are expressed when describing perfumes. Examining online communities that review perfumes reveals an intriguing approach to understanding scent perception. In addition to the technical jargon commonly employed, which follows a structured format of notes at three scent layers, one occasionally encounters narrations that aim to capture the essence of the perfume's perceptual experience. It is argued that the narrativization of scent perception exemplifies a cognitive inclination to contextualize sensory inputs within a conceptual framework, facilitating the comprehension of non-linguistic experiences. This paper suggests a shift from a non-narrative mode of consciousness to a narrative mode as a means to elucidate the process of making sense of the seemingly nonsensical.
Do Speakers of Different Languages Perceive the World Differently? : Quantitative Analysis of Neo-cognitive Paradigms in French and English
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wright Donald
This study investigates whether statistical analysis of text data can reveal divergent reader reactions to the same content when presented in different languages. To address this question, we utilized Marcel Proust's, "À la recherche du temps perdu," a vast corpus spanning seven books with millions of words. Our analysis involved a comparison between the original raw French text and the raw English translation by Scott Moncrieff, incorporating three distinct analytical approaches. Linguistic Analysis: The initial segment of this study comprises a stochastic analysis of linguistic elements, encompassing words, syntax, grammar, and punctuation. These details are crucial in understanding the reader's interpretation of the literary text. Visual Syntax Mapping: In the second part, we employed a visual syntax mapping (VSM) technique to create numerical vector values based on word placement and proximity within the text. This approach assigns numerical values to each word, enabling the text to be computationally processed by machine learning models. Cosine similarity measurements were computed for character names in relation to the surrounding words, generating a two-dimensional graph of the referential fictional space. Reader Reaction Analysis: The final phase of the study involved evaluating reader reactions to words based on eye movement and heart rate data to determine their positive or negative connotations. By computing values for every word in the text and averaging these values for each sentence, we created a comprehensive map of reader reactions throughout the seven books to determine where and how much the reader reaction differs based on the language.
The Interpreting Market in Armenia: Challenges and Practical Observations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gurgen Karapetyan
The Armenian-Russian bilingualism dominating in Armenia during and after its Soviet membership is speedily transforming into an Armenian-Russian-English trilingual trio. The eroding political presence of Russia in Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union gradually weakened the dominant FL position of Russian in the country, creating an expansive platform for intercultural communication with the West. This, along with the advancing communication technologies, consequently strengthened the feeble position of the English language in Independent Armenia by pushing English-language instruction beyond the confines of public schools and universities to private tutorship, language schools, and inter-organizational missions. The improving English-language proficiency in Armenia not only safeguarded the establishment of a strong bilingual school of translatorship and interpreting, but also began to gradually increase the number of English speakers in the country. Because of this, the relative proportion of English speakers in local conferential audiences is constantly increasing, altering the linguo-dynamics of the interpreted auditorium and changing the formal behavior of institutionalized audiences and the psychology of formal meetings. These shifts are fostering unique and unprecedented challenges for interpreters, often leading to problems that seem to require unified solutions and are worthy of the attention of the translatorial community. Thus, the objective of this research is to identify the level of multilingualism in Armenian audiences and to see how it affects the professional activity of interpreters. The paper also attempts to propose possible regulations that can be used to avoid such imbalances that can render the interpreter's work redundant in certain settings.
