Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
7 results
Search Results
Item Philosophy and Translatability(2021) Enos, Casey; Rey, Georges R; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Can anything that can be said in one language be translated, without loss of meaning, into any other? Katz, inspired by Frege and others, argued for an affirmative answer to this question and proposed a Principle of Translatability. Since then, this alleged principle has come under scrutiny from linguists, who have proposed a number of counterexamples. While the consequences for Katz’s exact formulation of his principle are severe, the interpretation of the empirical data is often difficult and it is unclear whether slightly weaker principles may obtain. In my dissertation, I examine the literature discussing translatability and argue that it has suffered from a lack of precision regarding key terms, especially meaning and language. I propose that putting the question of translatability in terms of what Chomsky called I-languages allows better theoretical traction, although the exact question that we end up with looks very different from the one that we started with.Item Perceptual Resonance | Spatial Typologies as an Interpretation of Music(2017) BARKMAN, ERIN; Abrams, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis seeks to evoke a sense of place, identity and memory through a connection with music to capture the essence of place. Music can act as the link between architecture and people, to allow people to experience place in a more intimate way. By engaging all the senses, there can be a connection through our bodies to the building around us. Through the process of abstraction, we can link the audible world with the visual world, allowing music to resonate in architecture.Item Translating the "Other": A History of Modernist Literature in the American Southwest, 1903-1945(2016) Horton, David Seth; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)William Carlos Williams wrote, “The classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place.” There are now significant studies celebrating the “classic” regional literatures of Ireland, New England, and the American South. But what if the place is out-of-the way, and what if the words that mark it are difficult if not impossible to translate? The American Southwest is one such place, a literary region only recently coming into view. My dissertation forwards this project by focusing on how cultural work produced in the Southwest might represent the region despite the many difficulties of translation involved. Biographical, literary, historical, and archival materials allow for an interdisciplinary approach positioning Southwestern texts within the broader traditions of European and American modernism. My chapters explore the limits of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding. As with Pound’s approach to translating Chinese poetry, which did not entail learning Chinese, Mary Austin argues that she need not master an indigenous language in order to translate Native American texts. Instead, she claims to mystically comprehend their essential meaning, thereby enabling and limiting her insights into the region. While Espinoza’s El sol de Texas emphasizes the challenges faced by immigrants fleeing the Mexican revolution, Venegas’s Las aventuras de don Chipote offers a model for how to cope with such challenges by a process I term “transnational mimicry.” The lexical switching between English and Spanish provides numerous opportunities to mimic and mock southwestern cultural traditions, a strategy linking the region to other colonized spaces throughout the world. The texts of Luhan and Lawrence constitute spectacularly failed attempts at translating otherness. Luhan romanticized the local cultural geography, whereas Lawrence interpreted it through a Eurocentric point-of-view. Together, their work represents the epistemological limits of a vision dominated by Anglo power structures. I conclude with Cather’s southwestern novels and suggest that while Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novelistic illustration of Benjamin’s argument that all translations are marked by at least some degree of incommunicability, it also illustrates Ricoeur’s contention that a belief in translatability is foundational to any act of interpreting a text produced by an “other” human being.Item Measuring Career Aspirations in Korean College Women(2014) Kim, Young Hwa; O'Brien, Karen M.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to translate and evaluate the Korean version of the Career Aspirations Scale Revised (K-CASR). The American version of the Career Aspirations Scale-Revised (Gregor & O'Brien, 2013) was translated into Korean using multiple translation strategies. The psychometric properties of the K-CASR were examined with data from 377 college women in Korea. The confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the 18-item version of the K-CASR had good model fit with the hypothesized three factor structure (achievement aspirations; leadership aspirations, educational aspirations). The K-CASR also exhibited moderately high internal consistency and stability. Convergent validity was supported by positive correlations with achievement motivation, career orientation, and career goal engagement. Implications for future research and counseling were discussed.Item FUNCTIONAL AND MOLECULAR EVOLUTION OF THE PUF FAMILY(2012) Liu, Qinwen; Haag, Eric S; Biology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The modification of transcriptional regulation is a well-documented evolutionary mechanism in both plants and animals, but post-transcriptional controls have received less attention. The derived hermaphrodite of C. elegans has regulated spermatogenesis in an otherwise female body. PUF family RNA-binding proteins FBF-1 and FBF-2 limit XX spermatogenesis by repressing the male-promoting proteins FEM-3 and GLD-1. For my dissertation research, I examine the function of PUF homologs from other Caenorhabditis species, with emphasis on C. briggsae, which evolved selfing convergently. C. briggsae lacks a bona fide fbf-1/2 ortholog, but two members of the related PUF-2 subfamily, Cbr-puf-2 and Cbr-puf-1.2, do have a redundant germline sex determination role. Surprisingly, this is to promote, rather than limit, hermaphrodite spermatogenesis. I provide genetic, molecular, and biochemical evidence that Cbr-puf-2 and Cbr-puf-1.2 repress Cbr-gld-1 by a conserved mechanism. However, Cbr-gld-1 acts to limit, rather than promote, XX spermatogenesis. As with gld-1, no sex determination function for fbf or puf-2 orthologs is observed in gonochoristic Caenorhabditis. These results indicate that PUF family genes were coopted for sex determination in each hermaphrodite via their long-standing association with gld-1, and that their precise sex-determining roles depend on the species-specific context in which they act. Finally, I document non-redundant roles for Cbr-puf-2 in several aspects of somatic development. I show Cbr-puf-2 is required for reliable embryonic development, and that it is essential for vulval development and normal progression from early larval stage. I provide evidence suggesting that this latter role is related to pharyngeal muscle physiology. Thus, recently duplicated PUF paralogs, while redundant for some roles, can also rapidly acquire distinct non-redundant functions. This is consistent with theoretical models for the preservation of gene duplicates.Item 'Strange and Absurd Words:' Translation as Ethics and Poetics in the Transcultural U.S. 1830-1915(2011) Lauth, Laura E.; Lauth, Laura E; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: "STRANGE AND ABSURD WORDS:" TRANSLATION AS ETHICS AND POETICS IN THE TRANSCULTURAL U.S. 1830-1915 Laura E. Lauth, PhD, 2011 Directed By: Professor Martha Nell Smith Department of English This dissertation documents the emergence of "foreignizing" translation and its influence on poetic practice in the transcultural United States between 1830 and 1915--a period critical to the development of free verse in English. The study also explores the extent to which poetry translation constitutes a genre with special relevance to the multilingual U.S. In Lawrence Venuti's formulation, foreignizing signals the difference of the source text by disrupting cultural codes and literary norms in the target language (Translator's Invisibility 15). The innovative and ethically-charged translations recuperated here played a vital role in the development of "American poetry" by introducing heterodox authors, genres, and discourses into print. Despite nationalist and English-only tendencies in U.S. scholarship, the literature of the United States has always exceeded the bounds of a single language or nation. More than a mere byproduct of foreign dependency, the nineteenth-century proliferation of literary translations and non-English literatures reflected a profoundly multilingual "nation of nations." As such, this study emphasizes both the transnational and multicultural character of U.S. poetry. In tracing this often invisible tradition of foreign-bent translation, I offer five case studies spanning eighty years, two centuries, three continents, and numerous languages. From the influential debut of Bettina Brentano-von Arnim's self-translated Goethe's Correspondence with a Child (1838) to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's comparativist translation anthology, Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845); from Judith Gautier's pioneering vers libre variations on the Classical Chinese (1867) to binational poet Stuart Merrill's free verse Englishing of Gautier (1890); from Pound's heteroclite Medievalism (1905-1910) to the inaugural volume of Harriet Monroe's transnational magazine, Poetry (1912-1913), the translations considered here challenged "literary canons, professional standards, and ethical norms in the target language" (Venuti, "Strategies of Translation" 242). Taken together, these chapters offer a new transcultural perspective on modern literary translation and the development of free verse in English.Item An Internal tRNA-Like Structure Regulates the Life Cycle of a Plus-Sense RNA Virus(2007-12-12) McCormack, III, John Crisler; Simon, Anne E; Cell Biology & Molecular Genetics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Turnip crinkle virus (TCV) is a 4054 b plus-sense RNA virus that belongs to the genus Carmovirus in the Family Tombusviridae. The 3' terminal 200 b of TCV are predicted to fold into 5 hairpins labeled in the 3' to 5' direction as the promoter (Pr), hairpin 5 (H5), hairpin 4b (H4b), hairpin 4a (H4a), and hairpin 4 (H4), using 3' UTR phylogenetic comparisons with other carmoviruses and the RNA structural prediction program, mfold. H5 was found to be a highly-conserved structure containing a large symmetrical loop (LSL) that formed a tertiary interaction between the 3' side of the LSL and the 3' terminal nucleotides using compensatory mutational analysis in vivo. In plants, LSL mutations resulted in a mutation frequency that was increased by as much as 12-fold without inducing error catastrophe. The original mutations frequently reverted and led to second site alterations biased for uridylate to cytidylate and adenylate to guanylate changes. These results suggest that H5 may function as a chaperone to properly fold the RdRp. The TCV 5' UTR, which binds 40S ribosomal subunits, contains two short segments exhibiting IRES activity that function synergistically with the 3' terminal region to enhance cap-independent translation in vivo. In the TCV 3' UTR, H4a, H4b, H5, and flanking sequences, form an internal tRNA-like structure (iTLS) that binds 60S ribosomal subunits and the P-site of salt washed 80S ribosomes. The iTLS may therefore mediate assembly of 80S ribosomes, which are then transported to the 5' end for translation of virally-encoded proteins. Phylogenetic comparisons of carmovirus 3' UTRs revealed that Cardamine chlorotic fleck virus (CCFV) and Japanese iris necrotic ring virus (JINRV) are capable of forming the 5 elemental features comprising the iTLS. Ribosome binding and plant cell culture assays showed that only the CCFV iTLS bound 80S ribosomes and could functionally replace the TCV iTLS. These results suggest that closely-related members of the same viral genus may utilize different strategies for cap-independent translation.