Fragmentation / Integration and Involvement / Detachment in Chatroom Discourse
Studies of the discourse of electronic chatrooms usually aim at determining how close this variety is to the prototypes of spoken and written language by analyzing a whole range of different features. The paper investigates four points of difference: fragmentation, integration, detachment and involvement, which reflect various types of cognitive activities entailed in text production and reception. Fragmentation and involvement are typical of speaking, while integration and detachment are associated with writing and this analysis aims at determining how chatting resembles written or spoken language in respect of the frequency of occurrence of certain features.
Electric language : A new variety of English
Les As. analysent les traits lexicaux et grammaticaux d'un important corpus de messages en Communication Mediatisee par Ordinateur (CMO) envoyes a un systeme electronique de tableau d'affichage au Canada. Elles appliquent a ce corpus l'analyse factorielle de Biber, comparant le corpus electronique aux corpus informatises en anglais parle et ecrit. Elles identifient deux types de langage electronique (on-line et off-line) et les situent en fonction de six dimensions: informativite, narrativite, caractere explicite, persuasion, abstraction, elaboration
MT and the Swiss language service providers: an analysis and training perspective
Switzerland is perceived as a highly multilingual country, with four national languages and a solid translation tradition in official, administrative and corporate settings, now even extended to include English. A research case study was set up to investigate the understanding and use of translation and language technologies by Swiss language service providers. This paper highlights some findings, particularly focusing upon the issue of translation automation processes in multilingual documentation production, with a view not only to spot preconceptions or knowledge gaps about MT, but also to 
suggest some training principles. We will argue that training activities ought to present MT systems as 
key aiding components of translator workbenches and, their output, as a valid linguistic resource for further human refining, if necessary. Moreover, in line with the idea that MT can be part and parcel of multilingual content production cycles, we will look at the interaction of MT with controlled language, CAT tools and terminology work. In sum, we will make explicit the usefulness of MT against the 
widespread prejudice that investing in MT does not return any benefits given the ‘low and hilarious quality of its output’, as quoted by most of the interviewees of our case study.