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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The dependence on human involvement and human behavior to protect information assets necessitates an information security awareness program to make people aware of their roles and responsibilities towards information security. The purpose of this paper is to examine the feasibility of an information security vocabulary test as an aid to assess awareness levels and to assist with the identification of suitable areas or topics to be included in an information security awareness program. Design/methodology/approach -A questionnaire has been designed to test and illustrate the feasibility of a vocabulary test. The questionnaire consists of two sections -a first section to perform a vocabulary test and a second one to evaluate respondents' behavior. Two different class groups of students at a university were used as a sample. Findings -The research findings confirmed that the use of a vocabulary test to assess security awareness levels will be beneficial. A significant relationship between knowledge of concepts (vocabulary) and behavior was observed. Originality/value -The paper introduces a new approach to evaluate people's information security awareness levels by employing an information security vocabulary test. This new approach can assist management to plan and evaluate interventions and to facilitate best practice in information security. Aspects of cognitive psychology and language were taken into account in this research project, indicating the interaction and influence between apparently different disciplines.

Against the background of current corpus-based research on the features of translated language, this study investigates two research questions that emerge as “gaps” in existing research: (1) What are the occurrence patterns for the different hypothesised features of translated language, investigated together? (2) What is the relationship between register and the features of translated language? Utilising a comparable corpus of translated and original English produced in South Africa, the study tests two hypotheses based on the above questions. The first hypothesis is that the occurrence of linguistic realisations associated with particular features of translated language will demonstrate significant differences in a corpus of translated English texts and a comparable corpus of non-translated English texts, reflecting overall more explicit, more conservative, and simplified language use in the translation corpus than in the corpus of original writing. As a starting point for factoring in the variable of register, it was further hypothesised that the frequency of these features in the translation corpus will show no significant effect for the relationship between corpus and register — in other words, the translation-related features would not be strongly linked to register variation. This has the collateral effect of suggesting a broader hypothesis that in the translation corpus less register variation, or sensitivity to register, will occur, specifically as a consequence of translation-specific effects. The findings from the investigation provide limited support for the first hypothesis, with statistically significant differences between the two corpora for only two of the features investigated: the use of the optional that complementiser, and lexical variety. The second hypothesis, that the interference of the translation process will lead to a “levelling out” of registers, is not supported by the findings.

This article aims to disentangle three explanations that have been proposed for the increased explicitness of translated English, as reflected in the more frequent use of the complementiser that in translated English texts compared to non-translated English texts. These three explanations are designated as the cognitive complexity (or processing strain) hypothesis, the pragmatic risk-aversion hypothesis and the source-language transfer hypothesis. Four comparable register-controlled corpora are used for the analysis: a corpus of English translated from Afrikaans, a corpus of written Afrikaans, and corpora of written British and native South African English. A multivariate analysis of the factors conditioning complementiser omission across the four corpora is used to test the three hypotheses proposed. The transfer hypothesis is tested by investigating whether the translation corpus demonstrates overall omission preferences that are more similar to the omission preferences of Afrikaans than of English. The cognitive complexity hypothesis is tested by investigating whether translated English is more sensitive to the complexity-related factors that are known to condition omission than non-translated English. The risk-aversion hypothesis is tested by investigating whether translations opt for the communicatively and normatively “safer” choice of including the complementiser in contexts where non-translated writing would typically omit it, and therefore demonstrate less sensitivity to register and frequency effects than non-translated English. The findings of the study provide strong evidence against the transfer hypothesis and find stronger support for the pragmatic risk-aversion hypothesis although the cognitive complexity hypothesis cannot be ruled out.