Background: Childhood maltreatment is associated with alterations in morphology of stress susceptible brain regions. Maltreatment is also known to markedly increase risk for psychopathology and to have an enduring disruptive effect on sleep. Objective: To determine whether abnormalities in sleep continuity have effects on brain morphometry and to evaluate the extent to which sleep impairments mediate the effects of maltreatment on brain structure. Method: Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure (MACE) scale ratings, actigraph-assessed sleep and 3T MRI were obtained on N = 37 18–19-year-old participants recruited from the community (N = 34 with neuroimaging). Results: Fourteen participants had no history of maltreatment while N = 23 were exposed, on average, to 4.7 types of maltreatment. Multiplicity of maltreatment was strongly associated with reduced sleep efficiency, increased wake after sleep onset time and number/duration of awakenings, which were independent of effects of maltreatment on depression and anxiety. The most important predictors of impaired sleep were exposure to parental non-verbal emotional abuse at 9–10 years of age. Reduced sleep efficiency correlated with reduced grey matter volume in hippocampus including CA1 subfield, molecular layer and dentate gyrus as well as inferior frontal gyrus and insula. Sleep mediated 39–46% of the effects of maltreatment on volume of hippocampal structures and inferior frontal gyrus. Conclusions: Actigraph-assessed sleep is disrupted in maltreated late teens and mediates a significant portion of the effects of maltreatment on hippocampal volume. Studies are needed to assess whether efforts to enhance sleep in maltreated children can pre-empt or ameliorate neurobiological consequences of maltreatment.

The aim of this paper is to show the significance of product type and potential buyers’ expectations in ad translation for the production of commercially effective target versions. To this end, this study focuses on adverts for computer products as the referent of the advertising message, and computer users as the addressees. The cultural contexts in contact are the USA and the Spanish markets for these products. The source texts (ST) are adverts from popular USA computing magazines, while the target texts (TT) are from the same type of publications published in Spain. In order to measure the relevance of product type in the translation of these ads, a comparison of the STs and the TTs has been carried out in terms of verbal and non-verbal elements. The strategies used in the translation of these two groups of elements have been described and identified. The results obtained through the analysis of this corpus will shed light on (1) whether the shifts produced in the TTs respond to Spanish computer users’ expectations, that is, whether they are in line with the features of computing ads in Spanish, and (2) whether there are shifts clearly related to the product type.

ABSTRACT. Foreign language teaching and learning has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention across different stages of education, particularly in the case of English. Apart from language training in general contexts, language for special purposes also constitutes a prolific field of study. However, less research has been conducted on the foreign-language training needs of trainee translators and interpreters and the corresponding teaching methodologies. In order to gain insight into actual teaching practices in this area in Spanish universities, we have studied the methodological approaches used in the classroom by 58 foreign language lecturers at 13 Translation and Interpreting Faculties in Spain, through a research Project of the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). Information was compiled from the responses to an ad hoc questionnaire created for this purpose, sent out by email and filled out on a voluntary basis. This article describes the uses made of texts in foreign language classes, to which end we will focus on the responses to one of the questions posed in the questionnaire. One of the key findings of the study is the preponderance of lexical, semantic, morphological and syntactic features, potentially implying teaching methodologies akin to those used in other education settings.

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