J. Torous, Jessica M. Lipschitz, Michelle Ng
et al.
BACKGROUND Low engagement and attrition from app interventions is an increasingly recognized challenge for interpreting and translating the findings from digital health research. Focusing on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of smartphone apps for depressive symptoms, we aimed to establish overall dropout rates, and how this differed between different types of apps. METHODS A systematic review of RCTs of apps targeting depressive symptoms in adults was conducted in May 2019. Random-effects meta-analysis were applied to calculate the pooled dropout rates in intervention and control conditions. Trim-and-fill analyses were used to adjust estimates after accounting for publication bias. RESULTS The systematic search retrieved 2,326 results. 18 independent studies were eligible for inclusion, using data from 3,336 participants randomized to either smartphone interventions for depression (n = 1,786) or control conditions (n = 1,550). The pooled dropout rate was 26.2%. This increased to 47.8% when adjusting for publication bias. Study retention rates did not differ between depression vs. placebo apps, clinically-diagnosed vs. self-reported depression, paid vs. unpaid assessments, CBT vs. non-CBT apps, or mindfulness vs. non-mindfulness app studies. Dropout rates were higher in studies with large samples, but lower in studies offering human feedback and in-app mood monitoring. DISCUSSION High dropout rates present a threat to the validity of RCTs of mental health apps. Strategies to improve retention may include providing human feedback, and enabling in-app mood monitoring. However, it critical to consider bias when interpreting results of apps for depressive symptoms, especially given the strong indication of publication bias, and the higher attrition in larger studies.
Over the last decade, the treatment of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has become reliant on tissue and/or blood biomarkers to help guide treatment decisions. There are now multiple biomarker-defined patient subgroups, with evidence showing that treatment with targeted therapies has superior clinical outcomes when compared with traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy. However, rapid change in the field of precision oncology brings with it the challenge of translating recommendations into clinical practice. In this review, we discuss the major guidelines recommending biomarker testing in NSCLC, as well the logistical challenges to applying these guidelines to patients with NSCLC both in the United States and worldwide. The techniques commonly used for biomarker testing will be discussed, both for tissue- and blood-based biomarkers. Finally, we discuss the challenge of interpreting the results of biomarker testing and using these results to guide treatment decisions.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the hallmark of evidence-based medicine and form the basis for translating research data into clinical practice. This review summarizes commonly applied designs and quality indicators of RCTs to provide guidance in interpreting and critically evaluating clinical research data. It further reflects on the principle of equipoise and its practical applicability to clinical science with an emphasis on critical care and neurological research. We performed a review of educational material, review articles, methodological studies, and published clinical trials using the databases MEDLINE, PubMed, and ClinicalTrials.gov. The most relevant recommendations regarding design, conduction, and reporting of RCTs may include the following: 1) clinically relevant end points should be defined a priori, and an unbiased analysis and report of the study results should be warranted, 2) both significant and nonsignificant results should be objectively reported and published, 3) structured study design and performance as indicated in the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials statement should be employed as well as registration in a public trial database, 4) potential conflicts of interest and funding sources should be disclaimed in study report or publication, and 5) in the comparison of experimental treatment with standard care, preplanned interim analyses during an ongoing RCT can aid in maintaining clinical equipoise by assessing benefit, harm, or futility, thus allowing decision on continuation or termination of the trial.
Generative artificial intelligence translation (GenAIT) brings convenience yet also imposes severe challenges on the dissemination of knowledge. The respective (dis)advantages of GenAIT and human translation (HT), and the ways to promote their effective interaction have not been sufficiently explored yet. This study investigates the linguistic features of GenAIT and HT of scientific texts rendered from English to Chinese from lexical and syntactic levels. The GenAIT is generated by ChatGPT 3.5, a representative GenAI platform, while HTs are done by 19 Master-of-Translation-and-Interpreting students in China. Data shows that GenAIT and HTs present distinguished linguistic features in both levels. At the lexical level, HT exhibits lengthier texts with a lower average word diversity; GenAIT presents higher accuracy in translating terminology. At the syntactic level, the average sentence count in HT is greater, whereas its average sentence length measured in tokens is shorter. Moreover, human translators tend to transform sentences from passive voice into active voice more frequently than ChatGPT 3.5 does. Furthermore, human translators exhibit superior skills in deconstructing lengthy and complex sentences into shorter, more comprehensible clauses. This study reveals that ChatGPT 3.5 and human translators exhibit complementary capabilities in the translation of scientific texts, thereby suggesting an optimisation of the strengths inherent to both parties. Implications are provided for future translator training, language service providers and the ongoing development of GenAIT and HT.
Professional development aims to facilitate the maintenance, improvement and broadening of knowledge and skills, and has become a standard or even compulsory component of professional practice for many occupational groups. This paper traces the uptake of professional development amongst certified translators and interpreters in Australia, where in 2014 it was introduced as a requirement for newly-certified practitioners only, and in 2019 for all holders of translation or interpreting certification from the national certifying authority. Based on responses gained from a sample of 3,268 practitioners, we report high uptake overall with little variation according to level of qualifications. Slightly lower uptake rates are recorded only amongst ‘newcomers’ with less experience while for all others, it is consistently high. Lower uptake rates are recorded amongst those who work 1-10 hours per week and those earning up to A$10,000 per year compared to others working more hours and those earning more. A desire for more work does not co-occur with elevated levels of PD uptake. The data presented reflects the reported experiences of those who had already been required to engage with PD, those for whom this requirement was new with a three-year time window to undertake PD, as well as those for whom it still remains optional. These findings contribute to our understanding of PD uptake amongst a professional group whose engagement with post-certification training has been under-studied. Findings may inform relevant stakeholders in other countries considering measures to arrest atrophy and extend the skill sets of practising translators and interpreters.
Lipreading refers to understanding and further translating the speech of a video speaker into textual outputs. State-of-the-art lipreading methods excel in interpreting overlap speakers, i.e., speakers appear in both training and inference. However, generalizing those methods to unseen speakers incurs catastrophic performance degradation due to the limited number of speakers in training bank as well as the dominant visual variations caused by the shape/color of lips presented by different speakers. Therefore, merely depending on the visible changes of lips tends to overfit the model. To improve to generalise, in this paper we propose to use multi-modal features, i.e., visual and landmark, to describe the lip motion while being irrespective to speaker characteristics. The proposed sentence-level framework, dubbed LipFormer, is based on visual-landmark transformer architecture wherein a lip motion stream, a facial landmark stream, and a cross-modal fusion are interconnected. More specifically, the two-stream embeddings produced by self-attention are prompted into a cross-attention module to achieve the alignment across visual and landmark variations. The resulting fused features are decoded into linguistic texts by a cascaded sequence-to-sequence translation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generalise well to unseen speakers in multiple datasets.
. Experts and professionals in specialized fields often need writing tools to communicate in English as a means to disseminate their knowledge or enter the international market. There are different tools to accomplish this and most of them are, lately, Machine Translation systems (MT) based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT), an approach using artificial neural networks to translate with outstanding fluency. Free and open systems such as Google Translate or, more recently, ChatGPT used as a translator, have popularized NMT to a multitude of users. However, there are experts and professionals who, due to their lack of command of English, often fail in their communication tasks by accepting NMT system’s output as correct. This paper examines these systems ’ performance when translating terminology of the discourse in wine and olive oil tasting notes, specifically from Spanish into English. This domain may serve to represent less-studied specialized languages where general language words and terms become closely intertwined. The aim is to determine whether these systems can translate terminology accurately within the domain, and, if so, whether the GPT-3.5 model outperforms Google Translate. Results will help identify or discard possible language solutions for users who need to obtain texts in specialized English with professional and internationalization purposes, but who do not have the linguistic or economic resources to ensure the quality of the English text. Results show that, although ChatGPT yields fewer terminological errors than Google Translate in terms of error severity and number of samples affected, professionals cannot rely solely on these tools just yet.
Various observable on-screen translator behaviors, such as extended pauses in activity, mouse hovering, cycling through tabs/windows, and different kinds of scrolling, all common occurrences during task completion, have been regarded as potential problem indicators (cf. Angelone, 2018). Their presence is often attributed to a breakdown in declarative and/or procedural knowledge at a concrete problem nexus (Angelone and Shreve, 2011). Inspired by recent translation process research on aspects of cognitive ergonomics, pause-related cognitive rhythms (Muñoz and Cardona, 2018), and Kussmaul’s notion of parallel activity in the translation process (1995), we re- examine such phenomena through a different lens. We propose these phenomena may represent the loci of volitional, potentially strategic breaks rather than problem indicators per se. That is, the breaks observed are not necessarily linked to specific problems, but rather to subjects’ cognitive resource management. Our findings suggest that apparently random behaviors, seemingly unrelated to the task, generally have a positive impact on performance from both process and product perspectives. We refer to these breaks as instances of cognitive suspension, and, based on our findings, propose that translators engage in them as a refresh mechanism when performance has either waned or runs the risk of doing so. We start by examining cognitive suspension in terms of types and scope. This is followed by an empirical analysis of its direct impact on translation performance, as established by number of errors, number of generated characters, and number of typos within established windows (areas of interest) that precede and follow its occurrence.
This study asks whether translation might be a valid mode of (literary) criticism. It approaches a hortatory biblical text (1 Timothy 2.8-14 [3.1a]), somewhat notoriously and rigidly applied in some quarters of the church as containing timeless ethical instruction concerning women in the church, from the standpoint of its intertextual network, listening for resonance and dissonance as the relevant intertexts and precursor texts are explored. It is ultimately diagnosed as a text that is eschatologically obsolescent, and translated/rewritten, on the basis of its intertextual composition, to reflect the openness inscribed by the authorial Other.
This paper addresses the asylum seekers' right to language access and specifically the provision of telephonic interpreting services for people crossing the US southern border. An overview of the language access situation is presented in relation to basic asylum seekers' rights. The fundamentals of interpreting professionalism in this realm are also reviewed. The study aim is to examine interpreters' perceptions of their work environment as contractors for the two major language service providers working with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the US Department of Homeland Security. For this purpose, a corpus study was conducted based on online reviews posted on job search engines by current or past interpreter contractors. Findings identify perceptions of several inadequate management practices that negatively affect the work environment, job satisfaction and professional demands in terms of required qualifications, testing, training and supervision. The flaws observed point to an absence of the professional standards and motivation required to enable quality performance and therefore, professionalism. A proposal to offer professional services by engaged citizens is made.
The knowledge of both foreign and mother languages constitutes a core competence intranslator and interpreter training, as professional translation cannot exist if this competence has not been previously consolidated. Nevertheless, research regarding the teaching and acquisition of foreign languages within Translation and Interpreting studies is extremely scarce and its practice frequently adheres to general pedagogical models which do not keep to the ultimate goal and main objectives that should lay down the foreground for this type of teaching. On this basis, this article aims to discuss the main literature derived from this field of expertise and offer a reflection on the teaching implications. For such purpose, the teaching of foreign languages for translator and interpreter trainees will first be contextualized and a series of basic pedagogical principles will be established. Subsequently, an analysis of the four main communicative skills (written comprehension and expression and oral comprehension and expression) will be carried out. Last but not least, by way of conclusion, the teaching implications that derive from research into this area of knowledge will be discussed.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Translating and interpreting