Any study of standards is complicated by the existence of numerous meanings of the term, which are often used virtually interchangeably. A few of these uses are most relevant to this book. It appears that the term fi rst came into general use in English at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. According to a contemporary observer, Richard of Hexham ([1138] 1988, 67), in this battle between the En...

There is a growing interest among the higher education principals and policy makers to improve teacher evaluation methods and more important than that to use the evaluation data. A number of research studies implied the ineffective instruction of ESP courses in Iran (Atai, 2002; Eslami, 2005; Hayati, 2008; Ahmadi, 2008; Sherkatolabbasi & Mahdavi, 2012; Boniadi, Ghojazadeh & Rahmatvand, 2013). T...

In saying that consonant clusters are broken up, one should not be led to think that this is a description of the phonology of what may be a variety of English (in this case Hong Kong) in terms of deviation from a perceived standard. (See Mohanan 1992 for extensive discussion on the fallacies of such an approach.) Instead, the question should be: When Cantonese speakers hear English words, what...

The paper focuses on regional or local variations in English in Nigeria with particular reference to spoken English in which the variations are most noticeable. The three major Nigerian languages Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa are referred to mainly in consideration of the local variations in English. The variations are seen as inevitable because of the nature of the Nigerian society. The different pho...

This work describes the statistical machine translation (SMT) systems of RWTH Aachen University developed for the evaluation campaign International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2013. We participated in the English→French, English↔German, Arabic→English, Chinese→English and Slovenian↔English MT tracks and the English→French and English→German SLT tracks. We apply phrase-based ...

This paper describes the AFRL statistical MT system and the improvements that were developed during the WMT14 evaluation campaign. As part of these efforts we experimented with a number of extensions to the standard phrase-based model that improve performance on Russian to English and Hindi to English translation tasks. In addition, we describe our efforts to make use of monolingual English spe...