We're fascinated with the way words and languages work, how they travel across national boundaries and between cultures, and the relationship they have with our thoughts. The Sunday Times ranks us in their top-8 universities for languages.
Think about a human language - any human language - just for a moment.
Whichever language you pick, it will possess an astonishing complexity of sounds and syllables, of meaning and nuance, of structure and rules (and subtle exceptions).
Now think about the many thousands of languages that have existed in the course of history, each with its own unique characteristics.
It's enough to make your head spin, and yet each language seems simple to its own native speakers. To them, it is seldom more troublesome than breathing in and out.
The Surrey Morphology Group is one of the world's leading centres for the tricky task of making sense of word structure across different languages. As the Group has been carrying out this work for decades, they have compiled a rich resource of databases and dictionaries for a number of rare, unusual and fascinating languages.
Because these unique resources have been made available online and are routinely consulted by researchers from all over the world, we are playing a key part in the quest to understand one of the most basic yet complex human achievements of all - the very words people use to communicate with one another.
The economic crisis has forced many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to start competing for business across national, cultural and linguistic borders. But can they get into the mindset of potential overseas customers?
ARCTIC (Assessing and Reviewing Cultural Transaction in International Companies) is a University of Surrey-led research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to investigate the readiness of British SMEs to win trade abroad. What language-management strategies do they have? What cultural issues do they face? What barriers must they overcome?
The project team, led by Dr Doris Dippold, found that SMEs admitted losing contracts due to a lack of language skills or for cultural reasons they didn't always fully understand, but also that they have been making real progress. Many now see the value of investing in professional translation services, of employing native speakers from their target markets, of having a language-management strategy in place.
There's still lots to be done, but SMEs can acquire the necessary language skills and cultural awareness relatively quickly, for example through co-operation with universities (in the form of training, consultancy or student placement opportunities). The awareness and desire certainly seem to be there, and that's a good start.
Some languages have developed words with staggeringly complicated structures that can appear in literally thousands of forms, depending on what is being said, or when, or where, or about whom. This is the research area of morphology - the study of word structures.
Because language is so intimately linked with the human mind, understanding the complexity of morphology and typology (the categorisation of language types) can open up whole new insights into otherwise inaccessible aspects of cognition.
With funding from the European Research Council, academics in the Surrey Morphology Group are surveying 200 languages in a comprehensive typological and historical investigation of morphological complexity. With input from psycholinguistic and computational methodology, this is the first large interdisciplinary research project of its kind.
This research will give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of morphology, a component of language that is free of the functional, physiological and sociological constraints that normally shape other linguistic structures. It therefore promises to advance linguistic theory in particular, and the cognitive sciences as a whole.
In short, by better understanding the languages people speak, our research is creating better understanding of the thoughts people think.
It's a fact of modern life that more and more people live, work and take holidays in countries where they do not have full command of the local language. One side effect of this is the increasing need for interpreters in legal settings. For example, the European Union recently reinforced the right to an interpreter in criminal proceedings.
One response has been interpretation via video link, but it was unclear whether 'video-mediated interpreting' could guarantee a sustained standard of acceptable accuracy in a courtroom environment.
In research funded by the European Commission Directorate-General for Justice, Dr Sabine Braun and a team from the Centre for Translation Studies investigated interpreting quality in videoconference settings through a series of comparative studies.
The team found that interpreters encountered greater difficulties and a faster onset of fatigue when using video links, but also that basic problems could be overcome through improved configurations and training. They developed guidelines of good practice, and also designed and piloted training modules for interpreters and legal practitioners.
The European Council has adopted the study's recommendations as a set of continent-wide guidelines, while London's Metropolitan Police has also used Surrey's expertise to bring its interpreters up to speed in video-mediated interpreting.
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