Chaucer Gentrified: The Nexus of Art and Politics in the Ellesmere Miniatures
The twenty-three miniatures of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales (San Marino, Huntington Library MS 26 C 9) have been well studied, from Edwin Ford Piper's 1924 descriptive article to several essays in the 1997 The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, which was published in con junction with the sumptuous new facsimile of the manuscript and Mary C. Olson's chapter in Chaucer Illustrated.1 Among the issues debated over the decades has been the fidelity, or lack thereof, of the illustrations to the text. Piper, Martin Stevens, Malcolm Parkes, and A. I. Doyle have argued that the pictures are, in Stevens's words, "as faithful as possible to the verbal portraits."2 Conversely, Richard K Emmerson's close study of the miniatures denies that the artists attempted to reproduce Chaucer's verbal portraits. Olson concurs with Emmerson.3 Anyone who gives the Ellesmere miniatures more than a cursory glance must acknowledge that Emmerson and Olson are correct in stating that the artists' depictions deviate in varying degrees from Chaucer's descriptions. Such deviations generally do not detract from the pictures' ability to function as rubrics. On the contrary, the additions of the Physician's urinal, the Summoner's summons, the Reeve's keys, and the Clerk's books4 allow a reader to iden tify the characters quickly and so are included, even though (with the pos sible exception of the keys) they are inappropriate accoutrements to be carrying on horseback on a pilgrimage.5 Rendering images more easily recognizable was only one motivation for the artists' innovations, though. Taken together, the changes amount to a program seeking to deflect Chaucer's satire of the upper and upper-middle classes and of most of the religious figures while emphasizing the negative aspects of the lower orders. Whereas the text tends to the ambiguous and the equivocal, the illustrations consistently eliminate these qualities and instruct the reader/viewer in how to regard each pilgrim. The Ellesmere miniatures reveal that, within a decade of Chaucer's death, the Canterbury Tales was being turned into an icon of establishment values.
The Sins of Madame Eglentyne and Other Essays on Chaucer
The essays in this collection are principally concerned with Madame Eglentyne -- the demure and elegant prioress depicted in Chaucer's Canterbury. Tales. Each essay stands alone because Madame Eglentyne and her talc are approached by way of a number of different considerations, and each essay contributes to our understanding of this Canterbury pilgrim in important ways.
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.