In an era of globalisation, digitalisation, and the increasing use of AI (Artificial Intelligence), it is the aim of this joint multi-site project to ethnographically assess the lived experiences and affective effects of this technological transformation on multilingual language work in multinational institutions in ...

The WHO identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the ten major threats to global health. It can be assumed that the public discourse has a significant influence on the individual vaccine decision. Thus, to understand and counter vaccine hesitancy, it is crucial to understand how media reports on vaccination, how the ...

Recent developments of platforms for Open Research Data (ORD) have led to a high demand for training materials that enable researchers to successfully use FAIR data. That is particularly true for platforms offering access to large collections of language data and the application of data-driven and distant-reading ...

Language barriers in healthcare can lead to lower patient satisfaction, longer consultation durations and even lower access to medical services. To overcome these barriers and ensure proper treatment for allophone patients, healthcare professionals rely on interpreting services that are delivered in-person, via ...

Since COVID-19, interest in past pandemics has been greater than ever because lessons from history can contribute to a better understanding of the present. However, COVID-19 has revealed a flagrant memory gap about pandemics: Switzerland has lost its “collective memory” of 20th century epidemics. The experiences of ...

As new collaborators, Sandra McGury from the ZHAW working in the Swiss Global Competence Lab (SGCL) and Thi Thu Hien Dang from Hanoi University Vietnam (HANU) will use this research grant to write several project funding applications to fund their future project Aligning Swiss and Vietnamese Perspectives on Global ...

Psychosocial family counselling writes reports for stakeholders with different levels of literacy and expertise. Writing coaching and insights from corpus analysis enable family counselling to optimise their writing processes and to be understood by the stakeholders in the intended message.  ...

Can the use of augmented reality technology decrease Zoom fatigue during video conferences? A pilot study with multilingual persons and conference interpreters investigates this question. The results are expected to offer insights for future research on video conferencing.

The ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics develops Swiss-AL (Applied Linguistics), an ex- tensive collection of text data in all Swiss national languages, a linguistic processing pipe- line, and a browser-based analysis workbench, enabling researchers to explore copyright- protected data on public language use. ...

This project is submitted by ZHAW on behalf of the Swiss Global Competence Lab (SGCL), a consortium of four HEIs (BFH, HES-SO, SUPSI, ZHAW) joining together to develop innovation in internationalization. The objective of this project is to propose a conceptual framework underlying a Certificate of Global Competence ...

This project investigates how machine translation services can help employees from administrations, NGOs and education to communicate with refugees. Providing public services to newly arrived refugees is a linguistic challenge: interprets are expensive and not available for all languages. Although machine ...

Simultaneous interpreting depends on auditory and visual information. This pilot study investigates whether a seamless integration of visual and auditory information, achieved by displaying translations of technical terms on augmented reality glasses (AR), can lower cognitive load in interpreting.  ...

Since future applications and consequences of Affective Computing are still vague and hard to imagine, we rely on Science Fiction (ScFi) Prototyping as a central method for our communication concept. A SciFi Prototype allows the target group, adolescents and young adults, to experience a fictional future life with ...

The current migration crises as well as the necessity to recruit healthcare staff from abroad highlight the need for healthcare providers to deal with language barriers in a way that is efficient and patient-centred. Machine translation (MT) opens up new possibilities for multilingual communication and is ...

Internal digital communication channels have become an essential part of work life. The project aimsat promoting sustainability in employee's workplace behaviour at Dept. L. In order to achieve this,different interactions such as brief information, tips and surveys are emitted via Beekeeper,employees are thus ...

The project LEAD is designed to meet two specific needs: - data hub providing data on past pandemics in Switzerland (1890, 1918, and 1957), publicly accessible to different target groups; - selected data stories about forgotten past pandemic experiences.

The goal of this flagship is to develop information and communication technologies (ICT) for persons with disabilities. In particular, the flagship targets five applications: text simplification, sign language translation, sign language assessment, audio description, and spoken subtitles. Each application ...

Embracing Sustainability is an overarching goal in ZHAW’s strategic leadership, research and education. We contribute to this goal by: building a richly annotated text corpus on Swiss sustainability discourse (defined by the UN Sustainable Development Goals), giving access to the corpus for all ZHAW members and the ...

The project goal is to drive digital transformation by creating a communication tool for privacy policies, which puts the user perspective at the centre of its design. While the legal perspective (GDPR) cannot be neglected, we focus on transparency towards the user. We will create a visual label that provides the ...

The field study identifies the current state of digitized discourse analysis among public and private actors. As a result, a Swiss map of digital discourse analysis is created. Results of discourse research have shown: Those who want to be successful in society and make a difference must be able to orient themselves ...

SPPC (Swiss Process–Product Corpus of Student Writing Development) is a novel longitudinal corpus of L1 student writing, linking automatically annotated and aggregated process data with the resulting product (text) and competence data. It will facilitate the development of teaching interventions with appropriate ...

The objective of the project is to explore to what extent central developmental steps of school pedagogy from the mid-19th century are related to current debates in Switzerland. The hypothesis being investigated is that the school as an educational institution became the exposed object of the social statistics that ...

The BFH Business School offers a Bachelor of Science in International Business Administration degree programme in English. This programme is continuously developed and adapted to emerging needs and trends. One key element of the programme’s quality is its use of English as a medium of instruction. The change of ...

We investigate if and how the quality of video subtitles generated by AI-based technology (i.e. transcription and machine translation of spoken language) can be scored automatically.