Projects Translation Studies

Neural translation systems are transforming multilingual communication – and increasingly also in spoken contexts. While this development is opening up new opportunities, it is also raising didactic questions for foreign language teaching. Which skills will be important in the future if AI can offer…

The Computational Competences for Non-Tech Students project is a sub-project of the swissuniversities project digibasics.

This project, which takes the form of a preliminary study, is working to define the framework conditions for a research project that will be dedicated to exploring the potential offered by so-called speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) for verbal communication between foreign-language nursing staff…

The participatory research project investigates the challenges of school communication with foreign language parents/guardians, contributing to greater equity within the school system and high-quality schooling. The aim is to identify specific areas for action that schools can further develop in…

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…

Writing in most contexts today is done with digital, computer-assisted support. Technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) such as intelligent tutoring (IT), automated writing evaluation (AWE), automated text production (ATP) and machine translation (MT) present new opportunities,…

With increasing digitisation, purposeful reflection about the potential influence of current and foreseeable developments in socio-technical systems on cognition, meaning making and decision making in education and professional life has become ever more important. In the area of tertiary education,…

English has become the first truly global lingua franca. Even in multilingual Switzerland, English as a lingua franca (ELF) is replacing the four Swiss languages not only in international but also in intra-national communication. What appears at first glance to be a practical solution to…

Due to the increase in antimicrobial resistance in Switzerland and in the light of the health policy priorities "Health 2020", the Confederation has launched a national strategy against antibiotic resistance (StAR strategy) in cooperation with the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), Food Safety…

Issues surrounding the production, supply, and use of energy will be of concern to Switzerland in the next few years and the decades to come. In the project “Energy discourses in Switzerland”, researchers in the ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics are investigating the communicative prerequisites for…

Informed Consent and Comprehensibility Issues Research involving humans as subjects can be problematic from an ethical standpoint, because people’s welfare and personal sphere should be protected. For this reason, legislation regulates that potential participants must be informed about research…

Like many other knowledge workers, professional translators spend much of their day making decisions at a computer: reading texts in one language, searching for background information in many languages, referring to terminology databanks to ensure consistency and appropriacy of lexical choices,…

The question of what translators really do when they translate and how they do it is the focus of this applied linguistics project, a large-scale longitudinal workplace study of translation processes and the development of translation competence. By “translation processes”, we mean the entire…

Our research project addresses the question of whether Canada’s official bilingualism policy might provide unexpected metalinguistic benefits to Canadians living abroad, such as protection from language attrition. We are investigating whether Anglophone and Francophone Canadians who grew up in…