Announcements

We are delighted to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is now a participant of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP). Authors funded by the BMGF can enjoy discounts on the APC, while the funder covers the costs of eligible articles centrally. BMGF also has access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information as well as Grant ID details for easy identification and additional transparency.

We hope that funded authors find the programme beneficial and we are happy to offer our IOAP to other funders that need a streamlined workflow of compliance checking and APC coverage. 

To claim their discount, BMGF funded authors should choose the particular funder and add their Grant ID upon online submission of their manuscript.

For any questions about the BMGF agreement, please contact the funder at support@chronos-oa.com or the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.

2018 has been a very exciting year for Languages: after the appointment of Prof. Juana M. Liceras and Prof. Raquel Fernández-Fuertes as the new Editors-in-Chief, and after being accepted for indexing in the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH Plus), the journal has been awarded with the Seal of Approval for Open Access Journals by the  Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

This important award means that Languages has achieved a high level of openness, adheres to best practice and guarantees high publishing standards according to DOAJ’s conditions of compliance.

The Editorial Office, along with the Editors-in-Chief and all the Board Members, would like to thank all the authors, editors, and reviewers who contributed to reach this milestone, and invite anyone working in language studies and linguistics to submit to Languages and enjoy quality open access publication.

Recently, it was announced that a group of European funders supported 10 principles that will help to expand open access, known as Plan S. MDPI warmly welcomes this move as a step towards achieving more open and accessible communication of research across all disciplines. Some aspects remain to be clarified, however the details given so far match the aims and values that MDPI has held over the past two decades.

We believe that open access publishers should be active participants in discussions around Plan S, particularly regarding potential new business models and practical aspects of implementation. MDPI supports APCs as a transparent unit of payment for article publishing, however we are committed to exploring other measures and recently signed the Jussieu Call. Sustainability is a key value for MDPI, and future funding models should have at their heart the sustainability of knowledge and research dissemination. Plan S provides an opportunity for funders and publishers to directly discuss funding of open access journals in ways that are beneficial to all parties involved.

Dear Colleagues,

The Editorial team of Languages is happy to announce the winners of the Best Poster Award at EuroSLA 28, held in Münster (Germany) on 5–8 September 2018.

The award has been granted to Dr. Miho Mano (Naruto University of Education, Japan), Dr. Yuko Yoshinari (Gifu University, Japan), and Prof. Yo Matsumoto (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan), whose poster was titled Representation of Sequential Path of Motion in L2: L1 Influence, Simplification, and Entrenched Patterns. The abstract is available below.

The best poster was voted by the scientific committee of EuroSLA 28.

The authors have been awarded 250 CHF in recognition of the quality and scientific significance of the work presented in the conference. We congratulate them for their accomplishments.

Languages Editorial Office

Abstract: This experimental study on motion event descriptions will empirically show the sources of inter-language characteristics of sequential path descriptions based on the production data from L1/L2English and Japanese, which include L1 Influence, simplification, and entrenched patterns, through contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) (Granger 1996). Recent L2 studies (Cadierno 2004) have examined the L2 descriptions of motion events in learners whose L1 differs from their L2 in terms of the typology of motion event descriptions (cf. Talmy’s (1991) work), and they have typically focused on the L1 influence as well as simplification in learners’ language. However, there still remain some issues. One issue is a phenomenon ascribable to neither of the factors, which was identified in our previous study: non-temporal sequencing of path segments (e.g. The dog ran into a cage from a soccer goal) rather than a temporal one (e.g. The dog ran from a soccer goal to a cage) found in English as an L2 used by Japanese speakers. In order to further examine this phenomenon, we analyzed production data from 12 Japanese-speaking learners of English (E-L2(j)) and 10 English-speaking learners of Japanese (J-L2(e)), as well as 15 English and Japanese L1 speakers (E-L1, J-L1), using a different set of video clips depicting more complex sequences of path segments than in our previous study. This experimental method ensured comparability of the data from different language speakers and allowed us a 4-way comparison. The results show phenomena suggesting L1 influence (choice of verb types) and simplification (simpler path phrases) in both learner languages, but they also revealed the E-L2(j) speakers’ frequent use of non-temporal sequencing (50.0%), which was far more common than in E-L1 (4.5%) or J-L1/J-L2(e) speakers (0%), who prefer temporal sequencing. We argue that this is due to learners’ own rule preferring the entrenched combination of verb and goal sequence in English. The difference between E-L2(j) and J-L2(e) is explained by the different word orders of the target languages. The role of entrenchment pattern is also discussed through learners’ written corpus data by using JEFLL corpus. This study also confirms the effectiveness of CIA in SLA studies.

We are happy to announce the establishment of an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals.

Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of our Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding.

Qatar authors that have their APC covered by QNL are advised to include the following sentence in their acknowledgments: "The publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library".

For more information, please visit Open Access at QNL or email the QNL Open Access team at openaccess@qnl.qa.

We are pleased to announce that Languages has been accepted for indexing in the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH Plus). The index was created and developed by European researchers under the coordination of the Standing Committee for the Humanities (SCH) of the European Science Foundation (ESF), and transferred to the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) in 2014.

To be included in ERIH Plus, scientific journals in the humanities and social sciences must meet rigorous standards. These standards have been developed jointly by NSD and ESF and are based on the main principles used by the ESF SCH in ERIH and the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers.

Languages is supported by our eminent Editors-in-Chief and Editorial Board Members, and its many contributions of high quality papers from leading experts in the field from renowned, international institutions. This achievement will help our authors’ publications increase their global visibility.

So far six MDPI journals are covered by ERIH Plus, see the attached link for the complete list.

The editorial team of Languages would like to congratulate the winners of the Best Poster Award at the Fourth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation (didTRAD 2018), held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

The best poster was voted by the attendees and the scientific committee of didTRAD 2018.

The Award has been granted to Dr. Rosa Isabel Basaure Cabero and Dr. Marcela Contreras Torregrosa (Department of Linguistics and Literature, Universidad de Santiago de Chile), whose work was titled Curricular Considerations for the Chilean Case: The Role of International Context in Translation Theory Teaching.

From left to right: Dr. Marcela Contreras Torregrosa, Prof. Amparo Hurtado Albir (Principal Resarcher at PACTE), Dr. Michele Cardani (Managing Editor of Languages), Dr. Rosa Isabel Basaure Cabero, Dr. Patricia Rodríguez-Inés (PACTE), and Dr. Christian Olalla-Soler (PACTE).

The abstract is available below:

Abstract: Nowadays, Translation education tackles not only linguistic problems, but other issues involving cultural and/or pragmatic elements. However, during their training process, sometimes translators are disconnected from highlights occurring in the international context, such as migration, international conflicts and Civil Society new gender-identity requests. This phenomenon establishes new challenges for translation practice and teaching immersed in a globalized world, giving us the opportunity to reflect on translators’ particularities and their role as cultural mediators, as well as the importance of the current socio-cultural context for this field. However, such reflection does not seem to penetrate into the Chilean undergraduate programs curricula, i.e. there would seem to be a weak relation between Chilean universities curricular design and the different realities and movements in a wider international context. Hence, this poster explores this issue and established that Chilean institutions partially adopt an international-based approach to translation education and presents the case-study of the Translation Studies undergraduate programme at the University of Santiago of Chile, which has successfully addressed these issues. The contents for the Principles and Foundations of the Translation course unit, as well as the development of a series of optional courses combining Translation and International Relations are highlighted at a potential way to consider these matters as a training core for future generations of Chilean translators.

The 2017 CiteScore™ data is available now, based on citation data in the Scopus® database. The current CiteScore reflects citation activity in 2017 for articles published in 2014‒2016. Please note that the list below includes journals assigned a CiteScore in this year’s release. For a full list of journals indexed in Scopus, please see our journal list.

Thirteen of our journals received a CiteScore which is in the top 10% of the distribution in at least one of the categories (marked with * in the table below), while a further 32 journals exhibit scores that are in the first quartile of the respective categories.

To access the full data for MDPI journals, please see here. More data can also be found in SJR Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

Unlike CiteScores and the widely used Journal Impact Factors, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metrics are normalized in order to correct for differences in citation practices between scientific fields. Therefore, the SNIP allows direct comparison between journals specialized in different fields.

According to 2017 data, MDPI publishes six journals with an average citation impact, or SNIP, in excess of 1.500. These journals are Biomolecules, Cancers, Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM), Marine Drugs, Remote Sensing and Sensors (see the last column in the table below).

CiteScore Data for MDPI Journals

A study published in Languages, elaborated by the Catalan linguist Silvia Perpiñán, from the Department of Modern Languages and Literature of the University of Western Ontario (Canada) and visiting scholar at the University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), reveals the birth of a new “native bilingual variety” of Catalan, with elements that are different from the Catalan spoken both by Catalan-dominants and Spanish-dominants.

The work deals exclusively with people born in Catalonia, i.e., with people who learnt Catalan and Spanish in their infancy. Perpiñán points out that the “native bilingual variety” is characterised by a linguistic comprehension of Catalan equal to that of the Catalan-dominants, but a production which is similar to that of the Spanish-dominants.

This finding has received a great deal of media coverage in the Catalan press:

La Vanguardia

VilaWeb

Diari de Girona

La Mañana

Directe

Currently, around 7 million people live in Catalonia. Of these, 31% have Catalan as their first language, while Spanish is the mother tongue of 55% of Catalans. A total of 65% of the people born in Catalunya are used to speaking both languages, meaning that an important portion of the population uses the second language regularly.

Reference article: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/3/2/14.

We are pleased to announce the results of the first MDPI Writing Prize. We received a large number of entries from across the globe on the theme of “The Global Benefits of Open Research”. It was a pleasure to read so many original, well-researched and well-presented ideas, and the final choice was not an easy one. We are pleased to announce that the winners are as follows:

1st prize (500 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Edmond Sanganyado, Shantou University, China

2nd prizes (250 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Kamala T. Rajahgopal, Asia e University, Malaysia
Yin Zhixuan, Qingdao University of Technology, China

3rd prizes (100 CHF, Swiss knife and certificate)

Alexandra Ticea, Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania
Ankur Sarker, University of Virginia, USA
Daniel Attoye, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

Congratulations to all of them! The winning entries can be downloaded by clicking on the names above. A compilation of all entries will soon be available as an open access book.

The writing prize is sponsored by the MDPI English editing service.