A Measure of Aggregate Syntactic Distance
We compare vectors containing counts of trigrams of part-of-speech (POS) tags in order to obtain an aggregate measure of syntax difference. Since lexical syntactic categories reflect more abstract syntax as well, we argue that this procedure reflects more than just the basic syntactic categories. We tag the material automatically and analyze the frequency vectors for POS trigrams using a permutation test. A test analysis of a 305,000 word corpus containing the English of Finnish emigrants to Australia is promising in that the procedure proposed works well in distinguishing two different groups (adult vs. child emigrants) and also in highlighting syntactic deviations between the two groups.
Detecting Syntactic Contamination in Emigrants: The English of Finnish Australians
The paper discusses an application of a technique to tag a corpus containing the English of Finnish Australians automatically and to analyse the frequency vectors of part-ofspeech (POS) trigrams using a permutation test. Our goal is to detect the linguistic sources of the syntactic variation between two groups, the ‘Adults’, who had received their school education in Finland, and the ‘Juveniles’, who were educated in Australia. The idea of the technique is to utilise frequency profiles of trigrams of POS categories as indicators of syntactic distance between the groups and then examine potential effects of language contact and language (‘vernacular’) universals in SLA. The results show that some features we describe as ‘contaminating’ the interlanguage of the Adults can be best attributed to Finnish substratum transfer. However, there are other features in our data that may also be ascribed to more “universal” primitives or universal properties of the language faculty. As we have no evidence of potential contamination at the early stages of the Juveniles’ L2 acquisition, we cannot yet prove or refute our hypothesis about the strength of contact influence as opposed to that of the other factors.
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.