The article presents the results of a study on the analysis of the influence of the frequency of passing tests on the learning curve when learning a foreign language. The analysis used the methodology for constructing a learning curve (LC) in the study of a foreign language and the tools of the LexSite reference and training system. As part of the study, an experiment was conducted to study English among students of the Karaganda technical university (2 groups of 10 people). Each group worked with the dictionary according to a specific algorithm of work. As a result, two CLs were built, after analyzing the approximation of which it was concluded that working with the dictionary more than 1 time per day and less often leads to a less rapid result, but the progress of memorizing words is smoother and more effective.

One of the most essential components in the foreign language learning process are online dual-language dictionaries. The efficiency in obtaining required lexical data from them directly translates into the efficiency of the learning process. Among other aspects, the order of presentation of retrieved translations is of great importance. Developers of online dictionaries often merge different source dictionaries in a single dataset, which results in translations placed in non-systematic order. Ranking using word frequencies obtained from national corpora does not solve the problem since the place of the translation in the list depends not from how often the word occurs in texts, but rather from how frequent the sense in which this word is used occurs. Besides, ranking must be done separately for translations belonging to different part-of-speech groups (nouns, verbs etc.). To understand the magnitude of the ranking effort, the scope of work needed should be determined beforehand. This paper describes the analysis of lexical units to be ranked in the lexical dataset used in the online dictionary LexSite. A subset made for this analysis includes 45,625 English words and 24,628 Russian words with corpora-based ranks below 60,000 in 4 part-of-speech categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). The study found that words with large number of lexical senses makes up about 3% of all words in the subset. Although words with small number of senses are in abundance (e.g. 3,955 English words in the 5-10 senses category), large efforts are unnecessary for these groups because small lists of translations normally are easy to understand. The paper discusses detailed results of the studies described above and substantiates the need and techniques for translation ranking in online dual-language dictionaries.

A Cognitive Approach to the Compilation of Test Materials for the Evaluation of Translator's Skills This paper discusses the importance of a cognitive approach to the evaluation of translator’s skills. The authors set forth their recommendations for the compilation of test materials for the evaluation of translators’ cognitive ability. Kognitywne podejście do kompilowania tekstów służących ocenie umiejętności tłumacza Artykuł porusza wagę kognitywnego podejścia do ewaluacji umiejętności tłumacza. Autorzy przedstawiają swoje zalecenia co do kompilowania materiałów testowych do ewaluacji kognitywnych zdolności tłumacza.

On development of “smart” dictionaries The paper discusses the need for development of intelligent dictionaries that allow for two-way interaction with its users. Theoretical ground for such development is suggested. Practical implementation as LexSite lexical resource is shown, concepts for further improvement of the efficiency are proposed.

Participants of international projects often speak different languages, which requires establishment and management of cross-language communications (CLC). CLC management is an integral part of the overall project management. In this paper text is represented as a set of matrices used to compute the actual volume of text to be translated instead of the original volume. The authors suggest that forecasting and management can be improved through analysis of text segments redundancies. The analysis was run on 4 datasets formed from texts stored in a large project documentation database (more than 19 million words). The redundancy curves are closely correlated even though the datasets were created from unrelated projects. The paper provides interpretation of the findings and numeric assessment of potential gain from using text redundancy.

Dialog between a Lexicographer and a Translator The discussion between the authors of the paper concerns the most pressing issues encountered in natural language semantics, as well as in corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. A broad range of knowledge, allowing linguists and information scientists to work together, is required in these areas. The paper describes some primary problems of human and machine translation caused by gaps between different fields of knowledge. The authors suggest that interdisciplinary approach is required when it comes to contrastive studies in linguistics.

Lexical need as a two-way reality cognition tool In this paper a concept of lexical need is introduced and its application in research of cognitive aspects of translation is discussed. Further discussion elaborates mechanisms of development of translator’s lexical space in the course of translation. Authors discuss the importance and special nature of low-frequency lexical units and difficulties encountered when studying their usage and suggest that the lexical need concept help these studies. Lexical need analysis can be also used to learn specifics of translator’s lexical space and then to take measures for selection of translators and improvement of their skills.