El uso de herramientas de traducción asistida por ordenador en las clases de traducción se ha convertido en una práctica común desde hace poco más de una década. Con todo, para los estudiantes actuales, los llamados “nativos digitales”, la experiencia de aprendizaje con este tipo de software está lejos de ser sencilla. Esto nos llevó a preguntarnos por las actitudes reales de los estudiantes respecto a la usabilidad de este tipo de software. Este trabajo presenta una evaluación de la usabilidad desde el punto de vista del usuario final de una memoria de traducción líder en el mercado. Más concretamente, el objetivo del estudio era evaluar la percepción de usabilidad de los estudiantes. Para ello, al final de dos cursos académicos, 95 estudiantes de último curso cumplimentaron el cuestionario Software Usability Measurement Inventory, que se considera un método de referencia para evaluar la usabilidad de un producto de software. Mide cinco escalas, esto es, Eficiencia, Afecto, Utilidad, Control y Aprendizaje. El análisis de los resultados obtenidos muestra que la opinión de los estudiantes sobre la usabilidad global de la herramienta evaluada está dentro de la media, pero no tanto con respecto a la escala Aprendizaje, que es la peor valorada. La única escala por encima de la media fue Afecto. Estos resultados muestran que se necesita hacer mayor énfasis en el diseño de la herramienta evaluada para que se adapte a las necesidades reales de sus usuarios y mejorar, de este modo, el conocimiento tecnológico de nuestros estudiantes de traducción.

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The need to update languages is a real and necessary fact. A language that is not continuously updated is left, over time, with a marginal presence in formal and prestigious communication, and consequently, plays little or no part in international communication. Although languages always change, these changes may be undetectable, since they occur gradually, or be clearly visible: lexical changes have the greater visibility in languages when the emergence of a new unit to describe a concept or a new reality becomes apparent.The most important reason behind the renewal of the lexicon is the need to change language to adapt to the changing environment. The world evolves, knowledge increases and is redefined, and languages should be able to express this renewal. The most representative linguistic units of this change are lexical units, as advances of all kinds, especially scientific and technological innovations are expressed through terms. Thus, neologisms represent the constant changes of a society and are a clear indication of the vitality of a language. In 1969, the word homophobia was first used in politics and Islamophobia was not used until 1991; Internet was used for the first time in 1976 and blog did not appear until the late 90's.This continuous movement, with the corresponding need for lexical renewal, is particularly important in specialized fields and, consequently, in terminology: Android phone, blamstorming, blocking minority, citizen journalism, cloud computing, tweet or wiki are new formal or semantic terms that name new realities in the specialized areas involved. Primary neology and secondary neologyThe rapid dissemination of scientific and technological developments, the introduction of new social and economic concepts in the real world, and the permanent intercommunication in the knowledge society require specialized terms. Therefore, languages have to update their terminology at the same rate of social changes. It is neither possible to build specialized knowledge without terms, nor possible to communicate or disseminate new developments in science or technology without new terms.Therefore, this continuous updating of the lexicon of languages occurs as a result of the creation of new knowledge in a language, or because the new knowledge of a speakers community are imported. In addition, it is incorporated into the receiving language through borrowings, coinage ex nihilo or through lexical units constructed from morphosyntactic and semantic resources of their own language. Every day, it is possible to observe situations that require new terms: a) in a context of knowledge production, a new entity to be named is discovered or invented; b) in a translation context, it may be necessary to select or propose an equivalent for a term in the original text which so far had only been named in the language that created the term; or c) in the context of language planning, institutions have to establish the most appropriate terms by adopting or adapting a loanword or by proposing a new formation.In these ac...

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Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis—linguistic and rhetorical—perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens’ behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves—the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination—that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions—voices of authority—to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain.