Faculdade De Letras Da Universidade Do Porto

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

Mestrado em Tradução e Serviços Linguísticos

Tradução Técnica Científica Inglês –Português

FINAL TEST

8June 2010

(Time available: 2 hours)

FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY.

Please translate ONEofthe following texts and send the translation as an MSWord attachment to both the following addresses:

Remember to:

A) call the exam file with your own name as in the following example: final_test_marta_santos;

B) send the test as MSWord attachment and write your name on the Word document itself;

C) write a brief message when you send the text (e.g, Dear Elena, attached please find . . .);

D) make a backup copy for yourself (either by saving the file on a pen or by sending it to your own email address/es).

N.B. REMEMBER TO:

ADAPT YOUR TRANSLATION TO ITS OBJECTIVE, MAIN FUNCTION AND AUDIENCE.

TRANSLATE IDEAS AND NOT WORDS (so don’t worry about departing from the structure of the original; the important thing is that your translation flows and reads naturally)

LEAVE TIME FOR REVISION! (i.e., manage your time carefully; when you’re reading through your text, if you have to read a sentence more than once to understand it fully, then there is something wrong with it)

TEXT 1

The following text is an excerpt from “Broken Mirrors. A Theory of Autism”, by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman, an article about the causes of autism published in Scientific American Reports, Special Edition on Child Development (Volume 17, Number 2, June 2007). You have been asked to translate this article for the Portuguese edition of the same magazine.

[. . .] These findings provide compelling evidence that people with autism have dysfunctional mirror neuron systems. Scientists do not yet know which genetic and environmental risk factors can prevent the development of mirror neurons or alter their function, but many research groups are now actively pursuing the hypothesis because it predicts symptoms that are unique to autism. In addition to explaining the primary signs of autism, deficiencies in the mirror neuron system can also account for some of the less well-known symptoms. For instance, researchers have long known that children with autism often have problems interpreting and metaphors. When we told one of our subjects “to get a grip on yourself,” he took the message literally and started grabbing his own body. Though seen in only a subset of children with autism, this difficulty with metaphors cries out for an explanation.

Understanding metaphors requires the ability to extract a common denominator from superficially dissimilar entities. Consider the bouba/kiki effect, which was discovered by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Koehler more than 60 years ago. In this test, a researchers displays two crudely drawn shapes, one jagged and one curvy, to an audience and asks, “Which of these shapes is bouba and which his kiki?” No matter what languages the respondents speak, 98 percent will pick the curvy shape as bouba and the jagged one as kiki. This result suggests that the human brain is somehow able to extract abstract properties from the shapes and sounds – for example, the property of jaggedness embodied in both the pointy drawing and the harsh sound of kiki. We conjectured that this type of cross-domain mapping is analogous to metaphors and must surely involve neural circuits similar to those in the mirror neuron system. Consistent with this speculation, we discovered that children with autism perform poorly at the bouba/kiki test.

But which part of the human brain is involved in this skill? The angular gyrus, which sits at the crossroads of the brain's vision, hearing and touch centers, seemed to be a likely candidate – not only because it is strategically located but because nerve cells with mirror neuron-like properties have been identified there. When we studied non-autistic subjects with damage to this area of the brain, we found that many of them fail the bouba/kiki test and have a disproportionate difficulty understanding metaphors, just like people with autism. These results suggest that cross-domain mapping may have originally developed to aid primates in complex motor tasks such as grasping tree branches (which requires the rapid assimilation of visual, auditory and touch information) but eventually evolved to an ability to create metaphors. Mirror neurons allowed humans to reach for the stars, instead of mere peanuts.

TEXT 2

You have been asked to translate the following text for the European Portuguese-speaking readers of a website called “Lab Tests Online – Peer reviewed. Non-commercial. Patient-centered”.( )

Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a general term used to describe disorders that can affect your heart (cardio) and/or your body’s system of blood vessels (vascular).

Most cardiovascular diseases reflect chronic conditions – conditions that develop or persist over a long period of time. However, some of the outcomes of cardiovascular disease may be acute events such as heart attacks and strokes that occur suddenly when a vessel supplying blood to the heart or brain becomes blocked.

The most popular usage of the term CVD is in reference to diseases that are associated with atherosclerosis. These diseases occur more frequently in people who smoke, who have high blood pressure, who have high blood cholesterol (especially high LDL), who are overweight, who do not exercise and/or who have diabetes. Public health initiatives focus on decreasing CVD by encouraging people to follow a healthy diet, avoid smoking, control their blood pressure, lower their blood cholesterol, exercise regularly and, if they are diabetic, maintain good control of blood glucose. Some of the classifications of CVD as described above include:

• Coronary heart disease (CHD) and coronary artery disease (CAD) – disease of the blood vessels supplying the heart that may lead to:
• Angina - intense chest pain
• Heart attack - myocardial infarction
• Congestive heart failure
• Cerebrovascular disease – disease of the blood vessels supplying the brain that may lead to:
• Transient ischaemic attacks (TIA) or “mini strokes”
• Strokes
• Peripheral vascular disease - disease of blood vessels supplying the arms and legs that can lead to:
• Claudication - obstructed blood flow in arteries, causing pain
• Gangrene - death of tissues in legs due to poor circulation
• Aneurysms - (bulges or enlargement) in the aorta and other blood vessels

The World Health Organization estimates that 17.5 million people died of CVD in 2005, representing 30% of all global deaths. Of these, 7.6 million were due to coronary heart disease and 5.7 million were due to stroke. As the leading cause of death world wide, cardiovascular disease is a focus of international interest.

A number of other diseases actually affect the heart and other blood vessels, including the veins. The heart can be damaged by problems that occur during development of the heart, termed congenital heart disease. Damage to the valves of the heart may occur from infections, termed endocarditis. The muscle of the heart may be damaged, either slowly (termed cardiomyopathy) or more quickly by infections (termed myocarditis). These and other heart diseases besides atherosclerosis are discussed in the heart disease page. Blood clots may develop in veins (thrombi) and may detach and go to other organs (termed emboli). Blood vessels may be damaged by inflammation, termed vasculitis.

TEXT 3

You have been asked to translate the following abstracts so that they can be included in the European Portuguese version of an online bibliographical resource tool specializing in education.

Schoolteachers' Experiences With Childhood Chronic Illness

Daniel L. Clay, Sandra Cortina, Dennis C. Harper, and Karen M. Cocco

The University of Iowa

Dennis Drotar

Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital

Cleveland, OH

The objective of this study was to examine the degree to which educators face problems associated with chronic illness in their pupils, the extent to which they feel responsible for addressing such problems, and the amount of training to deal with these problems. One hundred schools randomly selected from 10 counties in a Midwest state stratified on substance abuse deaths, mental health costs, and socioeconomic status (percentage of free lunches) were approached, and 17 agreed to participate. Of the 1,184 eligible educators, 480 provided complete surveys (response rate = 40%). Nearly every respondent (98.7%) reported knowing a student in the school with a chronic illness, and 43% felt moderately to very responsible for dealing with issues of chronic illness, yet 59% reported no academic training and 64% reported no on-the-job training for dealing with issues of chronic illness. Schoolteachers are ill-prepared to deal with issues of chronic illness in the schools. Practice implications are discussed.

ADULT EDUCATION AND DISABILITY STUDIES, AN INTERDISCIPLINARY

RELATIONSHIP: RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS FOR ADULT EDUCATION

MAVIS A. CLARK

GeorgiaPerimeterCollege

Disability studies is an emerging field of inquiry that investigates the disability experience asa socially constructed phenomenon similar to issues of race, gender, and class. However, theliterature of adult education shows that we are not making these same connections. Nor arewe conducting a thorough investigation of how the manifestations ofthe disability experienceaffect and/or constrain the adult learning context. This article promotes the idea of an interdisciplinaryrelationship between adult education and disability studies as a way to investigatethe disability experience within the adult learning context. An overview of adult educationand disability is provided first, along with a review ofthe disability studies literature, tshistory, tenets, and critiques. Embedded within this discussion are suggested implications foradult education practice and theory. The author concludes her discussion with possible ideasfor research that she argues will create new lines of inquiry within adult education.

Keywords: disabled adult learners; disability as a social phenomenon: interdisciplinary

relationship: disability studies

TEXT 4

The following is an excerpt from the book Twins, Triplets and More. Their Nature, Development and Care, by Elizabeth Bryan (London: Penguin, 1992). Its translation into European Portuguese is about to come out and the introduction is due to be published on the publishing company’s website.

Introduction

One cold winter night in March 1973 I was woken by my bleep and called to the delivery ward of HammersmithHospital where I was the junior paediatrician `on call'. Twins were being delivered by Caesarean section under an epidural anaesthetic. This meant that the mother was without pain but fully conscious. I do not know who was more surprised, she or I, as the babies emerged from the womb. One was a bouncing 6-pounder who looked as if he had had too much to drink; he was not only chubby but bright red. His brother, a little scrap of 3 pounds, was pale and wizened. Yet these two very dissimilar babies proved to be ‘identical’ twins. Something very strange must have happened in the womb. I decided to discover more.

This quest marked the beginning not only of a two-year research project on the function of the placenta but of my preoccupation ever since with twins and their families, not to speak of triplets, quadruplets, and the even higher multiple births. A few minutes in a delivery ward had given birth to one pair of twins and my life's work.

[. . .]

Everyone is interested in twins. Any mother who takes her babies out shopping will confirm that. Nevertheless, many people are also disconcerted or confused by meeting two people, whether children or adults, who are individuais yet indistinguishable from each other. Twins are attractions but also mystifying.

My long search for knowledge about twins has led me along many intriguing paths and I will try to share some of these with the reader. What kinds of twins are there? Why do they happen? What is it like to have two babies at once, to love two babies at once? Is the twin whose twin dies at birth still a twin? Why does the twin whose partner dies later in life sometimes feel only half a person? What happens when, perhaps due to a disability from birth, one twin has a very different mental and physical age to the other and yet looks very similar? How do twins react who have been separated at birth and then meet in adult life? What are the results of being born with two, three (or even five) brothers and sisters of the same age?

In pursuing questions like these I have found myself talking to parents of twins all over the UK, to doctors in China, Japan and Australia, nurses in South Korea, to anthropologists from Nigeria, Caribbean health workers in Curaçao, and to research workers at the famous twin centres in Minneapolis and Rome.

TEXT 5

The following is an excerpt from a book on demographic change in Europe. Its translation into European Portuguese is about to come out and the introduction is due to be published on the publishing company’s website.

Future Demographic Change in Europe:

The Contribution of Migration

Wolfgang Lutz and Sergei Scherbov

Europe is frequently called the “Old Continent” and it truly deserves this name in a demographic sense. Europe’s population currently has the highest median age of any world region, 37.7 years, according to the United Nations. By the middle of the century, the median age is likely to be 48 years in Europe, while in the “New World”, i.e., North America, the median age will be around 40. The rest of the world will be younger still.

Europe spearheaded global demographic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is likely to spearhead population aging in the 21st century. The population above age 60 has been increasing rapidly, and that below age 20 has been diminishing. Because of the very low levels of reproduction that have prevailed in large parts of Europe over the past decades, the age structure of the population has already been altered to such a degree that there will be fewer women of reproductive age in the years to come. The total population size of Europe is expected to decline in the long run, even when assuming a sizeable immigration and continued increases in life expectancy. Without migration gains, Europe’s population would age even more rapidly and population size would start to decline in the near future.

Although significant future population aging in Europe is a near certainty, the exact degree of aging will depend on future trends in fertility, mortality, and migration that cannot yet be fully anticipated. There is significant uncertainty around the three key questions: Will the birth rates in Europe recover, stay around the current level, or continue to fall? Are we already close to a maximum life expectancy beyond which there will be no further decline in mortality rates? And how many migrants will enter Europe in the coming decades?

All three of these factors matter for the future of population size and structure of Europe, but this chapter will primarily focus on the role of migration in future population dynamics. This will be achieved by looking at the different possible future migration regimes against the background of realistic ranges of future fertility and mortality changes. A short summary of the principles of population dynamics will be followed by a look at probabilistic population projections for the European Union and an attempt to quantify the importance of future migration for this outlook. The final part of the chapter will explicitly and systematically address the frequently asked question: To what degree can immigration compensate for the low birth rate in Europe?