This course will provide participants with an overview of communication issues that have crucial effects on a deaf person’s access to health and emergency services. Participants will acquire knowledge, strategies and a basic set of sign language to achieve effectiveness in communicating with deaf people in selected contexts requiring emergency services. Furthermore, the course leads participants to carefully consider deaf people’s needs in disaster settings and possible actions to take to reduce the risks they face. This is the first local-based online sign language course in Hong Kong focusing on disaster risk reduction through improving the communication between first responders, the public and persons with hearing disabilities in health emergencies and disasters. All signs in the course are demonstrated by the deaf. Serving health professionals and paramedics are invited as the actors to ensure proper skill demonstration. Due to its innovativeness, the course was invited by United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) to be presented in the Ignite Stage section in Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction 2019 in Geneva.
Those who work in modern language service industry are required to be capable of using computers and Internet to aid their translation job by adapting a variety of efficient tools, rather than just using word processor tools and several basic computer-aided translation software. This course teaches the basic concepts of computer-aided translation technology, helps students learn to use a variety of computer-aided translation tools, enhances their ability to engage in various kinds of language service in such a technical environment, and helps them understand what the modern language service industry looks like. This course covers introduction to modern language services industry, basic principles and concepts of translation technology, information technology used in the process of language translation, how to use electronic dictionaries, Internet resources and corpus tools, practice of different computer-aided translation tools, translation quality assessment, basic concepts of machine translation, globalization, localization and so on. As a compulsory course for students majoring in Translation and Interpreting, this course is also suitable for students with or without language major background. By learning this course, students can better understand modern language service industry and their work efficiency will be improved for them to better deliver translation service. The course is one of the PKU-DeTao MOOCs, which is a joint effort by Peking University and DeTao Masters Academy.
