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A number of studies have found that grammatical differences across registers are more extensive than those across dialects. However, there is a paucity of research examining intervarietal register change, exploring how registers change differently over time in different regional varieties. The present study addresses this diachronic deficit, focusing on grammatical developments – from the early 20th to the early 21st century – in corpora representing three written registers and two speech-based registers in Australian, British and American English. We conducted a factor analysis on 68 lexicogrammatical features to identify six dimensions of register variation, and subsequently investigated the diachronic change of the five registers across these dimensions. We interpret our findings in terms of the differential effects of broad social changes on individual registers, in light of existing findings on trends of change in different registers and varieties.

Background Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common genetic disease of the cardiac muscle, frequently caused by mutations in MYBPC3. However, little is known about the upstream pathways and key regulators causing the disease. Therefore, we employed a multi-omics approach to study the pathomechanisms underlying HCM comparing patient hearts harboring MYBPC3 mutations to control hearts. Results Using H3K27ac ChIP-seq and RNA-seq we obtained 9310 differentially acetylated regions and 2033 differentially expressed genes, respectively, between 13 HCM and 10 control hearts. We obtained 441 differentially expressed proteins between 11 HCM and 8 control hearts using proteomics. By integrating multi-omics datasets, we identified a set of DNA regions and genes that differentiate HCM from control hearts and 53 protein-coding genes as the major contributors. This comprehensive analysis consistently points toward altered extracellular matrix formation, muscle contraction, and metabolism. Therefore, we studied enriched transcription factor (TF) binding motifs and identified 9 motif-encoded TFs, including KLF15, ETV4, AR, CLOCK, ETS2, GATA5, MEIS1, RXRA, and ZFX. Selected candidates were examined in stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes with and without mutated MYBPC3. Furthermore, we observed an abundance of acetylation signals and transcripts derived from cardiomyocytes compared to non-myocyte populations. Conclusions By integrating histone acetylome, transcriptome, and proteome profiles, we identified major effector genes and protein networks that drive the pathological changes in HCM with mutated MYBPC3. Our work identifies 38 highly affected protein-coding genes as potential plasma HCM biomarkers and 9 TFs as potential upstream regulators of these pathomechanisms that may serve as possible therapeutic targets.

This introductory article will illustrate how ergonomics has come to occupy a prominent place in translation and interpreting studies. It will review the studies that have been carried out in recent years to measure physical, cognitive and organisational conditions within the language industry. It will be argued that, despite the growing awareness of the need to develop and teach sustainable practices within the classroom (see EMT Expert Group 2017), only scant attention has been paid to ergonomics in translator and interpreter training. This article seeks to map out the (largely unchartered) territory of ergonomics in translator and interpreter training and provide an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue of ITT.

There is substantial empirical evidence that translated texts demonstrate increased explicitness of lexicogrammatical encoding (or explicitation) compared to both source texts and non-translated texts in the target language. This increased explicitness has been ascribed to a number of causes, including source-language transfer or cross-linguistic priming, cognitive complexity or effort, and conservatism or risk aversion. This study investigates the occurrence of and the proposed reasons for the increased explicitness of translation, focusing on translated Chinese children’s literature as a test case. Quantitative corpus-linguistic methods are used to analyse the frequency of personal pronouns (as an operationalisation of lexicogrammatical explicitness) in a custom-built comparable corpus of translated and non-translated Chinese children’s literature. Qualitative analysis is used to explore the potential reasons for the differences in explicitness between these two subcorpora. The findings show that personal pronouns are more frequently used in Chinese children’s literature translated from English, compared to non-translated Chinese children’s books. However, this tendency does not play out across all the individual personal pronouns, suggesting that cross-linguistic influence or the ‘shining through’ of the source language is at the root of this increased explicitness.

Parliaments are a primary site where political and social democratisation can be seen in action, making parliamentary discourse, as represented in the Hansard of Commonwealth countries, a particularly relevant source of linguistic evidence for the effects of democratisation on language change. South Africa offers an exemplary case of social change which may influence language use. This paper first outlines the historical trajectory of democratisation in the South African parliament. It subsequently sets out to explore patterns of mutual influence between these socio-political changes and changes in the use of English modal auxiliaries of obligation and necessity in a specialised corpus consisting of the South African parliamentary Hansard, sampled at 10-year intervals from 1900 to 2015. The South African data are compared with data from comparable diachronic corpora of the Australian and British Hansard. We interpret our findings in the frame of possible linguistic democratisation aligned with social and political democratisation. Changes in the frequencies of must, should, HAVE to, (HAVE) got to, need and NEED to across the three varieties are reported first, before turning to the semantics of the modals must, should, HAVE to and NEED to. Our findings demonstrate how ongoing language change is receptive to local contexts of use. The data from the South African, Australian and British Hansards show signs of changes similar to the overall changes observed across native varieties of English, such as the gradual decline in the frequency of all modals together, and the increase in frequency of quasi-modals. However, where the British and Australian Hansards match the global trends more closely, the South African data show more signs of deviations from these patterns, which appear to be closely associated with not only demographic changes in parliament, but also the dynamics of conciliation in the broader framework of political democratisation and new patterns of political contestation.

International audience; This paper reviews entrepreneurial activities that take place within the simulated translation bureaus of member institutions of the INSTB network and establishes a link between entrepreneurism, self-efficacy and perceived competence. Reusing pre-test and post-test data of a student survey, a first attempt is made to design and test a survey instrument for gauging the impact of a simulated translation bureau on perceived entrepreneurial competence and self-efficacy for planning, setting up, and managing a translating organisation in pedagogical translation company simulations. Tentative results suggest a positive effect of participation in translation company simulation modules on students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy and perceived competence. Because of the anonymity of the data, pre-test and post-test responses could not be paired. As a consequence, the statistical significance of the results could not be confirmed.

This article investigates modal auxiliaries in original and translated Afrikaans and South African English parliamentary discourse in the period 1925–1985. Against the background of the sociolinguistic history of language contact in the bilingual South African parliament (1910–1994), it analyses (a) the contrastive differences in the use of modal auxiliaries in South African English and Afrikaans, (b) potential cross-linguistic influence in the use of modals between the two languages, and (c) the way in which contrastive differences and cross-linguistic influence are reflected in translations. In both languages, modal auxiliaries are more common in parliamentary discourse than in general usage. There is little evidence of overall convergence; there are, however, cross-linguistic similarities in specific pragmatic uses of modals in parliament. Translations show a large degree of shining-through from the source text, alongside adjustment to target norms; the tension between these two forces is variable, and influenced by social factors.

Since August 2017, more than 40 institutions (and over 800 translators) piloted the translationQ revision platform. This paper will not focus on the development of but shows some lessons learned from translationQ’s error/revision memories: how to recycle the errors (‘Big Wrong Data’) into useful insights for translation, translation evaluation and translation teaching. The translationQ project (a joint initiative of KU Leuven and Televic Education) was developed to automate and speed up evaluation processes in both translator education and the translation profession. The tool works for bilingual or monolingual text productions. The program’s core is an error or revision ‘memory’: it allows the system to recognize errors in new translations and to suggest corrections and feedback automatically; the program leaves room for human intervention. Still, the bulk workload of retyping the same corrections and feedback time and again is now done automatically by the tool, leading to more rapid and more consistent revision feedback and scoring. Revision memories can be shared and reused with new texts and with new trainees. The reporting module of the platform allows the profiling of translators (strengths and weaknesses) in an objective way

'Vroeger was alles beter'. Dat deze uitspraak ook in het vertaalonderwijs en op de vertaalmarkt weerklank vindt, hebben Folkert de Vriend van de Taalunie, Fedde van Santen van ITV Hogeschool voor Tolken en Vertalen en Gys-Walt van Egdom van de Universiteit Utrecht het laatste jaar gemerkt.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between editorial work, endonormativity and convergence in the South African context, presenting a corpus-based quantitative case study of how editing reshapes academic writing by users of the STL (White South African English, or WSAfE) and IDG (Black South African English, or BSAfE) strands in South Africa. An inductive, exploratory quantitative method is used to identify linguistic features that distinguish unedited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, and edited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, using a corpus of edited texts and their unedited counterparts. Two features are analysed in detail: the use of downtoners and possibility modals. The findings provide support for the endonormativity of BSAfE, with WSAfE more ambiguous. The two strands are largely divergent in their usage of the two individual features. With a few exceptions, editors leave BSAfE usage patterns unaltered but sometimes change WSAfE usage to be closer to British English usage. Editing thus either leaves the stylistic distance between the two varieties unaltered or increases it. These findings support an assessment of (sometimes problematised) endonormativity at the level of the individual strands, but no strong evidence for convergence