The study probes into translation students' perception of the value of online peer feedback in improving translation skills. Students enrolled in a translation degree in Australia translated a 250-word text on two separate occasions. On each occasion, the students were given another fellow student's translation of the same text to mark and provide anonymous peer feedback. The original translations from all the students, together with any peer feedback, were uploaded onto an online forum. The students were encouraged to download their own translation to review the peer feedback in it. They were also encouraged to download and peruse other students' peer reviewed translations for comparison. Upon completion of the project, the students were surveyed about their perceptions and appreciation of their engagement in the process in the following three capacities: (i) as a feedback provider, (ii) as a feedback recipient, and (iii) as a peruser of other students' work and the peer feedback therein. Results suggest that translation students appreciate online peer feedback as a valuable activity that facilitates improvement. The students found receiving peer feedback on their own translation especially rewarding, as it offered alternative approaches and perspectives on tackling linguistic/translation issues. In comparing the three capacities, students perceived reviewing feedback on their own work and perusing other students' work as more beneficial than engaging in giving feedback to others

When disyllabic words of Chinese are compounded, truncation often applies to yield a disyllabic output that draws one syllable from each of the contributing words, e.g., xiàdiē + fúdù → xiàdiē + fúdù → diēfú. A substantial portion of new words enter Chinese via this process, and all combinations of four underlying syllables are attested in disyllabic neologisms. Variation in which syllable of the base escapes truncation has been described as arbitrary, but our analysis uncovers a clear pattern. Informative syllables survive. We fit a logistic regression model to Chinese truncation patterns using two indices of informativity, constituent family size and frequency ratio. Both of these factors were significant predictors. To further explore the nature of informativity-based constraints on surface forms, we analysed the truncation probabilities predicted by the model for each base in the neologism corpus. As truncation probabilities increased so too did model accuracy. We interpret this result as evidence for a constraint regulating the degree of uncertainty in base-truncation mappings.

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