The paper presents machine translation experiments from English to Czech with a large amount of manually annotated discourse connectives. The gold-standard discourse relation annotation leads to better translation performance in ranges of 4–60% for some ambiguous English connectives and helps to find correct syntactical constructs in Czech for less ambiguous connectives. Automatic scoring confi...

BACKGROUND Telenursing is an expanding service in most Western societies. Sweden is a front-line country, with all of its 21 counties connected to Swedish Healthcare Direct (SHD) 1177. The intention of the service is twofold: to make health care more efficient, while also making it more accessible and safe for patients. Previous research has shown, however, that the service is not used equitabl...

This paper explores the interplay between Western conceptions of education and students fromother educational traditions,most specificallyJapan, through the lens of the author’s practice in internationaleducation.He examinesmodels of the private and public spheres and public discourse advanced by Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas in relation to the purpose of education, and discusses the transf...

This essay explores the media frame-changing process in the news coverage of the 1999 Columbine shootings, clarifying the news discourse focus on Columbine’s national importance. The study applies the van Dijk/Bell scheme of media analysis to 683 news articles from print and broadcast media published within 30 days following the incident. Insight is offered into the thematic content of the Colu...

This article illuminates discursive constructions of large bodies in contemporary society and discusses what discursive approaches might add to health care. Today, the World Health Organization describes a current "epidemic of obesity" and classifies large bodies as a medical condition. Texts on the obesity epidemic often draw upon alarming perspectives that involve associations of threat and c...

In their travel writings about Europe in the 19th century, Moroccan visitors compare and contrast what they see of the European artistic designs and aesthetic values with experiences from their own native cultures. In this paper, I analyze the discourse and rhetoric about the enjoyment of nature, landscape design and leisure aesthetics as explored in the travel writing of the Moroccan traveler ...

The Western novel, practicing imperialist Africanism, has historically othered Africans as savages. Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian writer, appropriated the colonizing West’s language and narrative to present the colonial encounter from an African perspective. Interestingly enough, both African and non-African scholars believe that Achebe’s novels inadvertently reproduced the essentialism that reduce...

Western governments currently prioritize economic growth and the pursuit of profit above alternative goals of sustainability, health and equality. Climate change and rising energy costs are challenging this consensus. The realization of the transformation required to meet these challenges has provoked denial and conflict, but could lead to a more positive response which leads to a health divide...

Freud’s rejection of nineteenth century psychiatry and neurology encouraged him to look for new models of diagnosis and healing. While Western medical discourse is based upon a rational approach founded upon the Hippocratic corpus, this paper argues that psychoanalysis contains many elements that can be traced to the healing cult of Asclepius. A close reading of Freud’s texts reveals that he wa...

This study aims at exploring postcolonial themes raised by Andrea Hirata’s Laskar Pelangi (Rainbow Warriors). Specifically, it will reveal the characteristics of hybridity found in the novel that prove this literary work may be categorized as postcolonial writing despite the fact that western or white colonialism has no impact or trace at all in the novel. Furthermore, the study will prove that...