Restandardisation defined as democratising language planning

Language planning

Language planning, in one way or another, is as old as human civilization. Every time that one polity  invaded  the  territory  of  another,  the  language  of  the  conqueror  was  imposed  on  the conquered. The Romans imposed their language across the civilized world as they  knew it. In the  21st  century,  the  practice  of  language  planning  has  become  increasingly  sophisticated. Eng...

Democratising health care governance ?

New Zealand’s ‘district health board’ (DHB) system has been under implementation since the 1999 general election. A key factor motivating the change to DHBs is the democratisation of health care governance. A majority of the new DHB members are popularly elected. Previously, hospital board members were government appointees. Inaugural DHB elections were held in October 2001. This article report...

Planning and ill-defined problems

Natural Language Generation as Planning under Uncertainty Using Reinforcement Learning

We present and evaluate a new model for Natural Language Generation (NLG) in Spoken Dialogue Systems, based on statistical planning, given noisy feedback from the current generation context (e.g. a user and a surface realiser). We study its use in a standard NLG problem: how to present information (in this case a set of search results) to users, given the complex tradeoffs between utterance len...

Literary Translation as a Nexus of Language Planning

In recent years, the discipline of Translation Studies (TS) has moved toward producing research that takes greater account of the social and cultural contexts in which literary translations are produced (Bassnett, 2010). As a result, the writings of TS theorists are generating insights that are increasingly relevant to the concerns of sociolinguistics. In particular, their written speech—taken ...