How Are Multilingual Systems Constructed: Characterizing Language Use and Selection in Open-Source Multilingual Software

Multi-lingual software systems are those in which the component modules are implemented in multiple languages. Reverse engineering such systems raises several issues, particularly with regard to providing automated tool support for the process. GRASP is a prototype software engineering tool designed to provide visualization of software control structure, complexity, and architecture. The paper describes GRASP and its use in reverse engineering multi-lingual software systems.

Issue addressedHealth promotion resources in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) languages are being widely translated and disseminated at the community, health service and government level. In addition to outlining the relevant Australian policy context and evidence base, this study sought to describe the availability and characteristics of COVID‐19 and maternal health promotion resources incorporating Indigenous languages.MethodsHealth promotion resources published online between June 2005 and June 2020 were identified by a desktop scan and screened against quality inclusion criteria. A content analysis by resource type, health topic, purpose, use of language and source was conducted.ResultsA total of 215 resources was eligible for inclusion, incorporating 50 different Indigenous languages and representing a varied approach to language use and health promotion. Almost 7 times as many COVID‐19 resources were identified than maternal health materials.ConclusionsIn contrast to maternal health, COVID‐19 has seen a sharp rise in the number of health promotion resources produced in language, especially in formats capable of streamlined replication in multiple languages. Strong use of narrative, storytelling and alternative primary aims such as language education suggests potential for greater collaboration between health promotion organisations and other community groups and services. Bilingual resources may have applications for communities where traditional language knowledge is being reawakened.So what?Emerging capacity to efficiently produce health promotion resources in multiple Indigenous languages could be capitalised for health topics beyond COVID‐19. However, further research in determining best practice and user perspectives is essential in guiding the development of these resources.

Practical issues in multi-lingual research

In India’s multilingual higher education system, language use reflects complex negotiations between institutional policies, social hierarchies, and identity practices. Within this context, translanguaging, understood as the strategic use of a multilingual speaker’s full linguistic repertoire offers a valuable framework for examining how individuals navigate these linguistic and social dynamics. However, limited research has examined how institutional structure and gender shape such translanguaging behaviours within Indian universities. This study investigates how institutional type and gender affect translanguaging among 522 university students across India. Drawing on data from both public and private institutions, it analyses language use across three domains: home, social and public, and academic and professional environments. The analysis employs Chi-square tests of independence to examine associations between institutional type, gender, and language use. The findings reveal that students from private institutions engage more frequently in English-dominant translanguaging, particularly in social and academic-professional environments, whereas female students demonstrate stronger maintenance of heritage languages within the home domain. These patterns highlight how institutional language policies and gendered expectations mediate multilingual behaviour in higher education. The study positions translanguaging as both an index of sociocultural identity and an adaptive communicative practice. It contributes to ongoing discussions on linguistic repertoires, social positioning, and multilingual agency in Indian educational contexts.

To ensure equitable access to education for emergent multilingual learners, teachers should hold certain beliefs (Lucas et al., 2015) about language, including sociolinguistic consciousness, a value for linguistic diversity, and knowledge of the sociopolitical positioning of language (Lucas, 2011). This study examines possible effects of critical language awareness (CLA) (Fairclough, 1992) coursework on the development of critical consciousness related to language, identity, ideologies and culturally sustaining pedagogies multilingual preservice teachers of color. The research question is: What are some effects of the CMLA coursework on multilingual preservice teachers’ perceptions about the following measures: language ideologies, supporting students’ multiple languages outside the classroom, advocating for students’ multiple languages in the classroom, and critical perspectives? ANOVA analyses on pre- and post-survey data from 48 preservice teachers suggest that CLA coursework had a significant impact on three of the four critical consciousness measures, at varying levels of significance. This study shows that critical content delivered through well-designed pedagogical treatments can help improve preservice teachers’ understanding of the language use in their future classrooms, empower them through reflection on their language, identities, and ideologies, and guide them toward more asset-based approaches to teaching and learning.

This study investigates the languages, the status of languages, and the languages used for communication by EFL students. The participants of this study were fifty students in the fourth semester in the English Education Department of Universitas Muria Kudus (EED UMK). The data were collected using a questionnaire and analyzed qualitatively. The findings show that the students use nine languages, i.e., Javanese, Sundanese, Indonesian, English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Korean. Javanese, Sundanese, and Indonesian belong to their mother tongue, while Indonesian is their national language. Meanwhile, English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Korean are their foreign languages. English has been learned by the research participants since elementary school. At present, English is their major in the department. The students realize that their English intensity must be increased since English has become their major as EFL students. The students’ bilingualism belongs to an elite bilingual since the students learn and acquire the second language(s) through formal education or conscious learning. In the context of Javanese and Indonesian, simultaneous bilingualism is relevant. Related to English and Javanese or Indonesian, successive bilingualism is more relevant.

Multilingual information retrieval system (MLIR) retrieves relevant information from multiple languages in response to a user query in a single source language. Effectiveness of multilingual information retrieval is measured using Mean Average Precision (MAP). The main feature of multilingual information retrieval is the score list of one language cannot be compared with other language score list. MAP does not consider this feature. We propose a new metric Normalized Distance Measure (NDM) for measuring the effectiveness of MLIR systems. NDM considers the MLIR features. Our analysis states that NDM metric gives credits to MLIR systems that retrieve highly relevant multilingual documents.

This monograph examines the language planning situation in South Africa, where language has been instrumental in the country's transition from colonialism to apartheid to democracy. In particular, it addresses, diachronically and synchronically, the issues of language spread and use, language policy and planning, and language maintenance and shift. The monograph is divided into four parts. The first part presents the language profile of South Africa to provide the background against which the aforementioned issues will be discussed. The second part discusses language spread and use, with a focus on language-in-education and the media. The third section looks at language policy and planning, with a focus on South Africa's new language policy and on attempts currently being made to implement it. It shows that there is a mismatch between the language policy and language practices, with the former promoting additive multilingualism, and the latter showing a trend towards unilingualism in English in virtually all the higher domains of language use. The implications of this trend for the current language policy and for language maintenance and shift are discussed in the final part, with special reference to the country's official languages.

In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual literatures, Monolingual States

Multilingual teams often include subgroups of members who share a native language different from the team's common language. Linguistic choices by members of these subgroups can have implications for information exchange at the team level. We reported a field study of language use in 3 multilingual teams, each of which consisted of some native English speakers (NS) and some non-native English speakers (NNS) who shared a native language with at least one other team member. We found that NNS often shifted between English and their native language. The way language shift happened differed for formal meetings, informal conversations, and instant messaging. Language variation was often associated with shifts in content, participants, and communication medium. Further analysis indicated that language shift had both benefits and costs for team communication, depending on the context in which it happened. Based on these findings, we outline suggestions for designing multilingual collaboration systems.

Metaphor is a linguistic tool used to express ideas or concepts through comparison. In the diachronic aspect, metaphor can be observed over time as it changes and evolves in a language.The term "diachronic" refers to the study of language evolution over time, and in this context, the article is focused on the evolution of metaphor in English poetry. The use of metaphor has been a consistent feature of poetry throughout history, and this article analyzes the ways in which metaphor has evolved over time in the English language.Different types of English poetry are analyzed in the article, ranging from medieval to contemporary, and tracing the evolution of metaphorical language in each era. This analysis involves identifying specific metaphors or themes thatwere popular in each era, as well as examining how the use of metaphor has changed over time [1, p.24]. Such methods as literary analysis, descriptive analysis, and comparative historical method were used to study metaphor in the diachronic aspect.By analyzing the use of metaphor in English poetry across different time periods, researchers gain insight into the historical and cultural contexts that shaped language use. It also provides insights into the cognitive processes involved in metaphorical thinking and language use. By examining how poets have used metaphor to convey meaning and evoke emotions over time, researchers gain a deeper understanding of how the human brain processes and interprets language.In summary, the study of the evolution of metaphor in the diachronic aspect on the material of English poetry is scientifically significant because it sheds light on the historical and cultural contexts of language use, provides insights into the cognitive processes involved in metaphorical thinking, and has practical applications in fields such as language teaching and natural language processing.

In this paper, the development of Multilingual Phone Recognition System (Multi-PRS) using four Indian languages—Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, and Odia—is described. Multi-PRS is an universal Phone Recognition System (PRS), which performs the phone recognition independent of any language. International phonetic alphabets based transcription is used for grouping the acoustically similar phonetic units from multiple languages. Multilingual phone recognisers for Indian languages are studied using two broad groups namely—Dravidian languages and Indo-Aryan languages. Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages are grouped separately to develop Bilingual PRSs. We have explored both HMMs and DNNs for developing PRSs under both context-dependent and context-independent setups. The state-of-the-art DNNs have outperformed the HMMs. The performance of Multi-PRSs is analysed and compared with that of the monolingual PRSs. The advantages of Multi-PRSs over monolingual PRSs are discussed. Further, we have developed tandem Multi-PRSs using phone posteriors as tandem features to improve the performance of the baseline Multi-PRSs. It is found that the tandem Multi-PRSs have outperformed the baseline Multi-PRSs in all the cases.

As speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two approaches: (1) adapting perturbation-based techniques used for automatic speech recognition (ASR) attacks to the ST context, making our work the first to apply this approach to ST, and (2) proposing a novel music generation-based method to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks have proven effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. Beyond immediate security concerns, our findings highlight broader challenges in the robustness and interpretability of neural speech systems.

Today, we have entered an era of big data. Under the background of global economization, communication in all walks of life is becoming more and more frequent and cross-language communication is inevitable. Cross-language communication is difficult for many people. The online translation system can greatly reduce the communication barriers between people of different languages. As an efficient tool, the translation system can realize the translation of different languages under the conditions of retaining the original semantics equivalent conversion. The article adopts the Internet of Things technology and big data model to build an English intelligent translation system, which can realize intelligent translation between multiple languages and English. The research results of the article show the following: (1) For samples with high semantic feature values, the correlation coefficient and similarity coefficient will be higher. Therefore, it can be concluded that for different semantics, the similarity is generally positively correlated with its feature value and correlation coefficient. The translation speed of the system proposed in the article is the fastest among the three translation systems. When the number of sentences is 10,000, the translation speed of the translation system proposed in the article is 5.89 seconds, the translation speed of the network multilingual translation system is 6.74 seconds, and the translation speed of the traditional translation system is 10.53 seconds. (2) The translation accuracy of the big data intelligent translation model proposed in the article is the highest among the three models. The translation accuracy of simple sentences can reach 99%. The translation accuracy of general sentences is 98%, and the translation accuracy of complex sentences is 95%. The BLEU value of the method in this paper is basically the same as that of the RNN cyclic neural network translation model. When translating general sentences, the BLEU value of the method in this paper is slightly higher than that of the RNN cyclic neural network translation model; especially when translating complex sentences by machine, the BLEU value of the method in this paper is far higher than that of the RNN translation model. (3) The average response time will increase with the increase in the number of tests, and the success rate generally remains above 98%, close to 100%, indicating that the response time of the system operation is normal. The number of designed test cases for the data processing module is 90, the number of executed test cases is 90, and the execution rate can reach 100%. Normal operation means that in the process of operation, no fault occurs. In the system load test, the load of serial number 1 is normal, the average delay is 38 seconds, the average delay of serial number 2 is 48 seconds, the average delay of serial number 3 is 59 seconds, the average delay of serial number 4 is 62 seconds, and the average delay of serial number 5 is 47 seconds. The delay of data packets under all kinds of loads can meet the standard requirements.

Known to be a diverse country of multiple cultures and multiple languages, India has faced the challenge of dealing with this resource called diversity. This chapter provides an overview of national-level language and education policies relevant to linguistic minorities and thus to Kumaunis. Language policies, both explicit and implicit, are evident in the Indian Census and Constitution as well as language-related education policies, including the Three-Language Formula and national recommendations related to medium of instruction. These policies accommodate Indian multilingualism and yet in some ways ignore diversity, grouping together many linguistic minorities and relying on linguistic categories that are arguably inventions from colonial times. Another layer of language planning involves the implementation of these policies and the actual use of language in the classroom, including translanguaging.