International Postgraduate Research Conference (IPRC)
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/155
Browse
8 results
Search Results
Item An Analysis of Culture-Specific Items in the French Translation VIRAGAYA ou le non-attachement of the Sinhala Novel Viragaya(19th Conference on Postgraduate Research, International Postgraduate Research Conference 2018, Faculty of Graduate Studies,University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Samarasinghe, H.Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) are the concepts which are specific for a language. The notions of these concepts differ from culture to culture. The CSIs employed in the novel Viragaya (1956) written by Martin Wickramasinghe have been analyzed with reference to its French translation VIRAGAYA ou le non-attachement (1995) translated by Bikku Mandawala Pannawansa. Wickramasinghe’s story brings out a philosophy of Buddhism; ‘viragaya’- a state where all desire, attachments, feelings are purged from the mind and it is presented through his protagonist Aravinda who is a product of the rural Buddhist background. In the process of translation, the French translator has targeted a reader who is neither familiar with Sinhala language nor its culture. Nevertheless, the translator used various translational strategies to transfer Sinhala CSIs in to French language in order to minimize the language gap between these two cultures. Thus, this study aims to categorize the gathered source language words, to identify the translational strategies used in the translation of CSIs of Sinhala to French, to find out the frequency of the translational strategies which leads to identify the most frequently employed strategy. The present study conducted based on both qualitative and quantitative methods. Collected data related to CSIs are discussed under 14 sub categories considering Peter Newmark’s Categorization of CSIs and Howard’s proposed categorizations. Then a total of 75 CSIs is analyzed using Eirlys E. Davies’s proposed taxonomy of preservation, addition, omission, globalisation, localisation, transformation. The findings highlight firstly, the strategy of preservation, globalization and the combination of preservation and addition are frequently used by the translator. Secondly, the most prevailing strategy is preservation which helps to preserve the local flavor added in the original. Thirdly, the strategy of preservation is used in the categorizations of species of flora and fauna, food culture, person names and place names, social related terms and employment, religious terms. The preserved cases are often explained with footnotes to assist the French reader to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text. This particular analysis is effective in the field of translation to identify the translational strategies used by the French translator when translating Sinhalese CSIs to French languageItem The Adaptation and Validation of Stroke and Aphasia Quality of Life (SAQOL-39) Scale for the Sinhala Language in the Sri Lankan Context.(19th Conference on Postgraduate Research, International Postgraduate Research Conference 2018, Faculty of Graduate Studies,University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Karunathilake, K.M.M.G.S.L.; Rathnayake, S.; Ranawaka, U.K.Stroke and aphasia rehabilitation aims to improve the quality of life of the individuals affected. Aphasia is a disturbance of the language. Most of scales for measuring health-related quality of life in stroke exclude people with aphasia due to inability to communicate during the questionnaires. However, it is vital to identify the effect on quality of life among individuals with aphasia to provide proper rehabilitation. No reliable measure was developed in Sri Lankan context to analyze this, which became the research question of the present study. The Stroke and Aphasia Quality of Life Scale-39 which is the commonest, valid and reliable measures was used in assessing quality of life among aphasia and it was analyzed applying to the Sri Lankan context. The following were the aims of the study, translate and adapt the (SAQOL-39) Scale for the Sinhala Language in the Sri Lankan context, identify its reliability and validity, identify the relationship between the severity level of communication and the quality of life level and analyze the most affected domain among aphasia population. The original (English) version of the SAQOL-39 has been adapted and translated using Delphi method. The sociocultural and linguistically adapted Sinhala version was administered on a group of 35 patients with aphasia to examine the test-retest reliability, inter rater reliability internal consistency reliability as well as the concurrent validity of the instrument. The inclusion criteria of the study population were as following, Aphasia resulting from a stroke at least after 6 months from the onset and not with the evidence of psychiatric illnesses and cognitive difficulty. 10 patients were used for the test retest assessment. And for the inter rater reliability assessment 2 raters were used. The Sinhala version of SAQOL-39 exhibited high test-retest reliability (ICC =0.83) as well as the inter rater reliability (ICC=0.99). This instrument exhibited high internal consistency (Chronbach's∝ =0.845) and also the concurrent validity was examined with the WHOQOL BREF and found a significant correlation between SAQOL-39 and WHOQOL-BREF (r=0.75, p=0.000). The most affected domain of the aphasia patients as the communication domain was identified through this study and it was also identified that there is a significant positive correlation (r=0.685, p=0.000) between the severity level of aphasia and quality of life. Despite the small sample size, the Sinhala version of the SAQOL-39 showed good internal consistency, inter rater reliability, test-retest reliability and concurrent validity. The importance of communication ability in perceiving the quality of life in patients with aphasia has also been highlighted.Item Effective Domain Specific Stopwords Generation for Sinhala Text(19th Conference on Postgraduate Research, International Postgraduate Research Conference 2018, Faculty of Graduate Studies,University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2018) Gunasekara, S.V.S.; Haddela, P.S.Sri Lankans mainly use three languages: Sinhala, Tamil and English in day-to-day life. However, Sinhala is the mother tongue of about 15 million Sinhalese, while it is spoken by 19 million people in total. As a result, they use documents written in Sinhala, to smoothly carry out official government communications with the public. Hence, there is a need for non-English based document analyzing and categorizing systems. To address these issues, researchers turned to a new research area called Text Classification. The removal of stopword list is often viewed as an essential factor of the text classification and it results in providing benefits such as: improve retrieval effectiveness, reduce the size of index and reduce the searching time. Stopword is a term used frequently and offers very little context on their own in any language. Common stopwords in Sinhala are, for example: prepositions (‘ඉහත’, ‘පසුව’, ‘පිළිබඳව’) and conjunctions (‘හා’, ‘ද’, ‘විසින්’, ‘සඳහා’). So far stopword list have been developed for almost 50 languages like English, Chinese, Hindi etc. However, there is no widely accepted stopword list for the Sinhala language. Even though, it is easy to use general stopword lists which are implemented already, it is insufficient to use such stopwords in certain applications. For example, in the domain of sports texts, terms like “ලකුණු” (score), “ක්රීඩා” (sports) and “කණ්ඩායම” (team) occur almost in every document, and these terms are identified as stopwords based on its importance. In contrary, when criminal data set is considered, the aforementioned stopwords are identified as important words. Generally, the standard stopword list does not cover such domain specific terms. Hence, this paper demonstrates how to generate a domain-specific stopword list from a given data set of Sinhala newspapers. It contained 1000 documents that vary in length and fall into five categories (politics, crime, business, religion and sports). Accordingly, experiments were conducted with seven stopword identification methods (Term Frequency, Normalized Term Frequency, Double Normalized Term Frequency, Document Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency, Normalized IDF, TF*IDF) and classifiers (Maximum Entropy, Naïve Bayes), previously applied to other languages. By using the above methods, a new algorithm for building a domain-specific stopword list is proposed. From this method, the stopwords are observed by threshold value and classified by average F-measure and average accuracy in each category. Depending on the comparative study among seven stopword identification methods, the most effective stopwords identification method can be identified. Similar to previous researches, the Normalized IDF method achieved the best improvementin the accuracy after omitting its unique stopwords including 0.994% value of average F-measure from the given tested dataset. Also, the Maximum Entropy classifier is more sensitive to stopword removal than the Naïve Bayes by comparing F-measure and accuracy of each category. According to the results of study, the effective stopword identification method and classifier can be changedaccording to thesize of the corpus. In future work, to further test this approach, it can be investigated whether other methods and classifiers can be utilized in order to achieve more effective stopword lists for Information Retrieval (IR).Item Syntactic Difficulties Encountered by Sinhala Native Speakers in Learning German as a Foreign Language(In: Proceedings of the International Postgraduate Research Conference 2017 (IPRC – 2017), Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Danansooriya, D.M.H.M.When the attention is focused on learning German as a Foreign Language as a beginner in the first year at University of Kelaniya it has been observed that the learners who do not have any knowledge in German before the university entrance find it difficult to comprehend the syntactic patterns in German language. Particularly due to the influence of the mother tongue Sinhala, in which the syntactic pattern is different, the students find it confusing at the initial stage of learning the language. Furthermore, when constructing sentences, the students have the tendency to translate word by word following the syntactic rules of their first language. The word order in declarative sentences the verb should be in the second position in German. Second position does not mean the second word. It means the second element in a sentence. However, the majority of the students merely count words when they make sentences and thus construct grammatically incorrect structures. As the data collecting methods researcher analysed the answers written by the students in their written work including continuous assessments, class tests and end of course examinations. Furthermore, face to face interviews with the lecturers in German, questionnaire reviews, student performance analysis and classroom observation were also done in order to gather data. This study focuses on common areas of syntactic difficulty for a larger number of students at beginner level. In conclusion, the study helped to find out the common errors done by the students in learning syntactic patterns and develop teaching strategies that can minimize the number of difficulties encountered by the first year students in learning the syntactic patterns. Research sample of this study limited to 50 students at beginner level, University of Kelaniya, interviews with five teachers at other institutions revealed that the difficulties encountered in grasping the syntactic patterns are common among the learners. Thus, it is envisaged through this study that the learners as well as teachers of German as a Foreign Language in Sri Lanka will have an insight into areas of difficulty in syntax faced by students of German that need more attention when designing lessons at beginner level.Item A Comparative Study on the Sound Systems of Hindi and Sinhala Languages(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Hirimuthugoda, H.; Perera, W.U.P.All languages in the world are mainly based on verbal sounds that are symbolized through letters. Thus, an interconnection between the sound system and the alphabet can be found in any language. According to the International Phonetic Alphabet, there are about hundred and seven verbal sounds which have been identified in all the languages worldwide. Each language uses a minimum of twenty-three to a maximum of sixty sounds. Therefore, when comparing the phonetics of two different languages, there can be sounds that are shared and different sounds that are unique to each language. Hindi and Sinhala are two languages that belong to the same language family, the Indo-European language family, with common roots derived from Sanskrit. There are both similarities and a considerable number of differences between the phonetics of the Hindi and Sinhala languages. This paper attempts to identify the similarities and differences of the sound systems of Hindi and Sinhala languages. The objective of this research is the creation of a platform of discussion to minimize the errors and mistakes by students who learn either Hindi or Sinhala as a foreign language. This research was done through literature reviews based on Hindi and Sinhala linguistics. It was identified that there are verbal sounds that are common to both languages and differences such as the employment of nasal vowels, two open-mid vowels, two velar fricative sounds and two retroflex flap sounds in Hindi which are not found in the Sinhala sound system. This study is important because it enhances the learning and teaching methodologies of Hindi as a foreign language in Sri Lanka while supporting the Hindi speakers who learn Sinhala as a foreign language.Item A Comparative Study of Hindi and Sinhala Idioms: With Reference to Selected Idioms in Connection with Human Body Parts(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Gunarathne, M.C.Idioms plays an inseparable role in Hindi and Sinhala languages which are belong to Indo- Aryan language family. In these two languages there are various idioms which indicate human body parts with related to their own culture. The purpose of this study is to examine how body parts have been used in Hindi and Sinhala idioms. Dictionaries of idioms have been used as primary resource. Books and magazines related to Sinhala and Hindi literature have been used as secondary resource. This paper indicates that there are some idioms which have been based on the same human body part as well as in some causes different body parts have been used to convey the same meaning. This paper highlights that there are more Hindi Idioms which are based on human body parts rather than in Sinhala. It also highlights that some idioms based on body parts such as ‘mɑ̃g bhərnɑː’ (married woman) are difficult to understand without knowing the cultural background of the language. Another finding of this research is that there are more Hindi idioms on body parts which conveys more than one meaning but in Sinhala language it is hard to find such causes. The above mentioned findings of this paper help us to understand Hindi and Sinhala idioms based on body parts according to the cultural background of its’ own.Item The strategies used by the translators to depict the French cultural aspects into Sinhala(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Ekanayake, E.M.V.R.S.A variety of languages with different cultures has created a great demand for the translation in the current diversified society. Translation, according to Marianne Lederer, is a process of reading, understanding of a source language text and rewriting it in a target language. We create a similar situation in foreign language. Therefore, the translation plays an important role on crossing through different cultures and communication. Thus, the translators are always in the risk of finding the terms for their translations as they have to fully comprehend the idea and the environment of the source text. There are idioms, colloquial terms, borrowings, special terminologies in the domain and cultural expressions which make the task of a translator more complicate. This paper provides an insight to the strategies used by the Sinahala translators, who translate directly from French, to portray the source French culture in Sinahala. Encompassing the theory of source oriented or target oriented by Jean-Rene Ladmiral, it explicates the methods of two Sinhala translators who have translated the novel : L‘etranger by a great French novelist Albert Camus. To be more specific on the methodology, which is a descriptive analysis, the author depicts how these translators have presented the French cultural aspects which include the behavior, courtship, morals, customs, clothing, institutions, and beliefs etc. in their Sinhala translation. Having acknowledged the content of the translations, and vividly analyzing the strategies, it is evident that each translator has his own method of presenting the cultural aspects. One can use transcoding process not only focusing on the language but also on the cultural transposition. Thus, he can either contemplate on the reader of the target text or source text. Moreover, he can develop his own adaptation.Item Pronunciation Problems in French: A Case Study of First Year Students at University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Gunawardena, C.The present research, a case study, analyzes pronunciation problems encountered by First year students of French at University of Kelaniya. The study is based on the assumption that the pronunciation errors were systematic and did not occur randomly and they reflect the interference of the different prosodic patterns of the learners‘ native language. Data were collected at three occasions when the present researcher worked as a lecturer in 2012. First, following the contrastive analysis hypothesis, potential pronunciation difficulties were identified and then the contrastive analysis hypothesis was validated by the error analysis. The informants used for this study were 20 undergraduates who were at the time of the study studying French as a foreign langue in the first year at University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. They were chosen using random sampling method. All participants had a homogenous linguistic background. All subjects had completed their secondary education in Sinhala medium and during which they had also learnt French. A battery operated audio tape recorder and a 120-minute blank cassettes were used for recording. A list comprised of 150 words representing all French phonemes was used to diagnose pronunciation difficulties. The recording was conducted individually in the faculty language lab and each recording approximately took ten/fifteen minutes. After the completion of recording, the recordings were replayed to identify common errors which were immediately transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The errors were classified into four categories; developmental errors, interference errors, fossilized errors and unique errors. The findings revealed that the majority of the errors were interference errors related to French vowels and initial clusters. The fundamental errors showed that similarities between languages do not always facilitate the language acquisition. The findings of the research will be important to teachers, students, curriculum designers, policy makers and other fellow researchers in Sri Lanka.