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1 – 10 of over 2000Jesús Cardeñosa and Carolina Gallardo
The aim of this paper is to show how multilinguality is permanently present in organizations in this global world, and how they should take into account the multilingual…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to show how multilinguality is permanently present in organizations in this global world, and how they should take into account the multilingual phenomenon specifically from the perspective of knowledge management in order to gain presence in markets.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach followed by the authors consists of a review of the published literature addressing this issue during the last years, followed by a proposal of applicable technologies in each step of the information processing.
Findings
The clearest finding is that if technology is not used for solving the problems that arise when dealing with multilingual contents, efficient information managing turns out a rather difficult task.
Research limitations/implications
The paper points out a number of different states in the information flows, which make it possible to study and analyse the most appropriate technologies for their orderly treatment. A unified treatment of the information flows is recommended, especially if there are multilingual components.
Originality/value
The issue of multilinguality in organizations, a possible cause of a weak penetration in the global world, has been scarcely studied and hardly tackled from a methodological perspective. This paper suggests technologies adequate for different situations when managing organizational information.
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Since the late 1970s, the term “informatics” has increasingly been adopted to describe the application of information technology to various fields, such as legal informatics…
Abstract
Since the late 1970s, the term “informatics” has increasingly been adopted to describe the application of information technology to various fields, such as legal informatics, medical informatics, social informatics and organizational informatics. This article provides a brief survey of informatics with respect to its historical background, disciplinary identity, fundamental aspects, applications, and challenges.
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Multilingual meetings continue to be a problem in business communication due to the necessity to translate between different natural language pairs. The paper has developed a new…
Abstract
Purpose
Multilingual meetings continue to be a problem in business communication due to the necessity to translate between different natural language pairs. The paper has developed a new electronic meeting technology that automatically translates comments written in any of 41 languages (e.g. French, Chinese, etc.). The purpose of this paper is to quickly and accurately show on each user's terminal in his or her own native language all comments contributed by the group written in several different tongues.
Design/methodology/approach
A prototype system, Polyglot II, utilizes instant messaging on Microsoft Windows PCs to exchange comments between client personal computers and a server which in turn, calls the Google Translate API for each translation. In an attempt to measure the accuracy, reverse translations are conducted, e.g. English to French to English, because of the lack of human experts fluent in all of the languages. The final English translations are analyzed for comprehension by 240 college business students.
Findings
This paper uses reverse translations on 32 of the languages (all that are available at the time of the analysis) with historical transcripts of English text, including grammatical errors. Results show an overall comprehension accuracy of 86 percent for all languages. Italian is the most accurate, and Hindi is the least.
Originality/value
While other multilingual meeting technologies have been developed, this system provides automatic support for the most languages and is perhaps the most accurate.
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This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of the hybrid information specialist in the academic library setting. It does this in relation to curriculum development for preparatory…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of the hybrid information specialist in the academic library setting. It does this in relation to curriculum development for preparatory and continuing professional education for librarianship and makes particular reference to the contemporary iSchools movement.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews trends and developments in academic information services and the information science academy in the context of continuing technological advances and educational change. It presents a case study of curriculum development and portfolio renewal, using the specialist roles of digital library manager and information literacy educator to show how the principles of interactive planning can be applied in articulating an academic strategy to meet the changing demands of educational institutions, professional bodies and employers.
Findings
There are significant parallels between professional education and professional practice in the shifting boundaries, expanded portfolios and challenged identities evident in the current information marketplace. A combination of continuous incremental development with periodic fundamental review enables professional educators to meet the changing mandates of different stakeholder groups. When combined with a strong professional focus, the breadth and depth of multidisciplinary expertise found in a research‐led iSchool facilitates the design of specialised pathways and programmes for practitioners moving into blended roles.
Practical implications
Practitioners intent on careers in academic libraries should consider the opportunities and demands of hybrid blended roles when choosing educational programmes and pathways.
Originality/value
The paper provides a conceptual framework to illustrate the nature of emergent professional roles and current challenges facing professional educators. Ackoff's interactive planning theory is used to illuminate the problem of academic planning in complex pluralist contexts.
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This paper presents a morphological classification of languages from the IR perspective. Linguistic typology research has shown that the morphological complexity of every language…
Abstract
This paper presents a morphological classification of languages from the IR perspective. Linguistic typology research has shown that the morphological complexity of every language in the world can be described by two variables, index of synthesis and index of fusion. These variables provide a theoretical basis for IR research handling morphological issues. A common theoretical framework is needed in particular because of the increasing significance of cross‐language retrieval research and CLIR systems processing different languages. The paper elaborates the linguistic morphological typology for the purposes of IR research. It studies how the indexes of synthesis and fusion could be used as practical tools in mono‐ and cross‐lingual IR research. The need for semantic and syntactic typologies is discussed. The paper also reviews studies made in different languages on the effects of morphology and stemming in IR.
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Fatemeh Sheikhshoaei, Nader Naghshineh, Sirous Alidousti and Maryam Nakhoda
There are many challenges in the development of a digital library (DL) and their complexity can be approached effectively with a maturity model. In a maturity model, the features…
Abstract
Purpose
There are many challenges in the development of a digital library (DL) and their complexity can be approached effectively with a maturity model. In a maturity model, the features of a phenomenon are divided into different levels and at each level, they are first improved before going on to the improvement or realization of the next level. The purpose of this study is to design a digital library maturity model (DLMM) in Iran.
Design/methodology/approach
The DLMM was designed using a qualitative approach, meta-synthesis and the Delphi technique. First, the maturity features of a DL were identified by assessing 68 sources of study concerning DLs and maturity models using meta-synthesis. The maturity features were then validated by experts using the three-round Delphi technique. Finally, the experts were asked to categorize these features into the five levels of the capability maturity model (CMM) as the base model.
Findings
By analyzing these sources, three categories, seven concepts and 35 codes for the maturity features of a DL were identified. The majority of previous studies focused on the use of hardware/software systems as the backup and empowerment of DLs and the concept of DL content. The maturity features were then validated by experts using the three-round Delphi technique. Like the base model, DLMM has five levels, and most features were categorized into the third and fourth levels by the experts. Features such as human resources, needs assessment of DL and readiness to create a DL were included in the second level.
Originality/value
This work adds the concept of the maturity model to the literature of DLs.
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Shu Fan, Shengyi Yao and Dan Wu
Culture is considered a critical aspect of social media usage. The purpose of this paper is to explore how cultures and languages influence multilingual users' cross-cultural…
Abstract
Purpose
Culture is considered a critical aspect of social media usage. The purpose of this paper is to explore how cultures and languages influence multilingual users' cross-cultural information sharing patterns.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a crowdsourcing survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 355 multilingual users who utilize two or more languages daily. A mixed-method approach combined statistical, and cluster analysis with thematic analysis was employed to analyze information sharing patterns among multilingual users in the Chinese cultural context.
Findings
It was found that most multilingual users surveyed preferred to share in their first and second language mainly because that is what others around them speak or use. Multilingual users have more diverse sharing characteristics and are more actively engaged in social media. The results also provide insights into what incentives make multilingual users engage in social media to share information related to Chinese culture with the MOA model. Finally, the ten motivation factors include learning, entertainment, empathy, personal gain, social engagement, altruism, self-expression, information, trust and sharing culture. One opportunity factor is identified, which is convenience. Three ability factors are recognized consist of self-efficacy, habit and personality.
Originality/value
The findings are conducive to promoting the active participation of multilingual users in online communities, increasing global resource sharing and information flow and promoting the consumption of digital cultural content.
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Dan Wu, Shu Fan, Shengyi Yao and Shuang Xu
Ethnic minorities (EMs), who make up a sizable proportion of multilingual users, are more likely to browse and search in their native language. It is helpful to identify…
Abstract
Purpose
Ethnic minorities (EMs), who make up a sizable proportion of multilingual users, are more likely to browse and search in their native language. It is helpful to identify multilingual users' information needs to provide public digital cultural services (PDCS) for making their life better.
Design/methodology/approach
The in-context interview is an efficient way to explore EMs' information needs and evoke their daily experience with PDCS. The material from 31 one-on-one interviews with EMs in China was recorded and analyzed using thematic analysis.
Findings
The findings reveal that language proficiency is a critical factor influencing multilingual information access (MLIA) and multilingual users' information needs. Moreover, language ability, digital literacy and cultural literacy are important components of multilingual information literacy (MLIL), which is helpful for EMs to access PDCS. In light of Kochen's theory, the information needs of PDCS can be classified into the aroused need of resources, the recognized need of functions and services and expressed need. For the expressed need, it is necessary to develop a one-stop convergence platform of PDCS to process various requests of resources, functions and services in the future.
Originality/value
The findings will be valuable for governments, public institutions and social organizations in identifying, addressing and resolving these issues about PDCS.
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Before COVID-19 pandemic, translation students in higher education attended courses on computer-assisted translation to acquire operational knowledge of professional software…
Abstract
Purpose
Before COVID-19 pandemic, translation students in higher education attended courses on computer-assisted translation to acquire operational knowledge of professional software, without experiencing collaborative/interactive learning. In few European universities skills labs were introduced to offer fieldwork-like activities, but without shared modelling standards and mainly held in presence for few consecutive days. As the COVID-19 pandemic further deprived students of crucial educational experiences, the purpose of this paper is to present an online collaborative learning environment exploiting a customised combination of information and learning applications the students already experienced during the pandemic to smoothen their learning curve and increase the educational effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach
A multi-framework methodology to build and operate a computer-supported online collaborative skills lab for translation students is proposed. Reference standards and guidelines are leveraged to provide participants with a common knowledge ground, to activate the computer-supported collaborative learning perspective, and to ensure an appropriate simulation fidelity.
Findings
An end-to-end implementation of the proposed approach along with educational effectiveness analysis performed via complementary assessment strategies is presented. Achieved outcomes highlight significant participation rate, consistent improvement in technical and soft skills at both individual and collective levels, and clear activation of collaborative learning dynamics.
Practical implications
Every master degree in translation teaching can adopt this approach by complying with the proposed guidelines.
Originality/value
The proposed multi-framework approach is novel and applied to a teaching sector where it is highly needed to fill a pre-existing gap.
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This study aims to survey academic users in order to identify their needs and expectations about multilingual information processing when they interact with digital libraries. The…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to survey academic users in order to identify their needs and expectations about multilingual information processing when they interact with digital libraries. The study specifically aims to determine the disparities in needs and expectations when users speak different languages.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey was designed to fill in the gaps in the knowledge about academic users' multilingual needs and expectations for digital libraries. The survey questionnaire incorporates questions about different aspects of the participants' multilingual needs and expectations covering multilingual needs, the multilingual behavior, often‐used multilingual information resources, and desired functions for the multilingual services, retrieval and interfaces in digital libraries. The results are obtained through statistical analyses and clustering methods.
Findings
Overall, participants exhibited many multilingual needs during their academic activities. They often require multilingual information when they access academic databases or web information. Frequently, participants use online translation resources and tools, but they are not satisfied with the translation quality. Participants want many multilingual capabilities in digital libraries; they also want more sophisticated multilingual search interfaces. However, participants from different countries or who speak different languages show significant differences in their multilingual needs and expectations of digital libraries. This study's three user groups demonstrated clear differences in all aspects of multilinguality examined, as did the three latent groups identified through the clustering methods.
Originality/value
Few studies have examined the multilingual information process in digital libraries from the point of view of academic users. This study draws its inputs directly from real academic users from different countries and provides insights into multilinguality in digital libraries.
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