A common characteristic of communication on online social networks is that it happens via short messages, often using nonstandard language variations. These characteristics make this type of text a challenging text genre for natural language processing. Moreover, in these digital communities it is easy to provide a false name, age, gender and location in order to hide one's true identity, providing criminals such as pedophiles with new possibilities to groom their victims. It would therefore be useful if user profiles can be checked on the basis of text analysis, and false profiles flagged for monitoring. This paper presents an exploratory study in which we apply a text categorization approach for the prediction of age and gender on a corpus of chat texts, which we collected from the Belgian social networking site Netlog. We examine which types of features are most informative for a reliable prediction of age and gender on this difficult text type and perform experiments with different data set sizes in order to acquire more insight into the minimum data size requirements for this task.

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The translator as a writer: Text production competence as a component of translation competenceMost translation scholars and practitioners believe that translators should be able to write. What this writing competence for translators entails and how it differs from the competence of writers remains undiscussed. In this article we compare the relevant literature from translation studies and writing research. Translation competence models do not mention writing competence but refer (implicitly) to text-productive competence. This term emphasizes that the text-production that takes place during the translation process may be more or less source text-oriented and therefore may resemble to a greater or lesser extent other forms of text production. The translator’s text-productive competence seems to be restricted to communicative competence in the target language, building on declarative but predominantly procedural lexical, grammatical, pragmatic and textual knowledge. This communicative competence in the TL cannot be viewed in isolation of the ability to control interference from the source text and source language. The translator’s text-productive competence also appears to build on strategic knowledge. A comparison between the competences of writers and of translators shows that they indeed share many identical knowledge types, skills, abilities and attitudes. Although a number of writing subcompetences bear great resemblance with translation subcompetences, closer examination reveals divergence in their scope, their purpose and organisation.

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Editing and translating are interconnecting concepts with fuzzy borderlines. In 1989, Stetting coined the term transediting to refer to the overlap of both activities in the translation task. This article reviews the existing literature on this topic. It also reports on an exploratory study of transediting in the translation processes of translation students with different degrees of declarative and procedural knowledge. Four MA translation students were asked to translate an American patient information leafl et (PIL) for a Dutch-speaking audience in accordance with the valid European Medicines Agency (EMA) directive. Of the four participants, two participants possessed only declarative knowledge of both the EMA standards and the text type. The other two participants also had some procedural knowledge, i.e. experience with translating patient information leafl ets. Data on the translation processes were collected through thinkaloud protocols and computer keystroke logging. By triangulating the data, we found not only a difference in the degree of transediting carried out by the participants, but also divergence in phase allocation of transediting in the translation processes. No clear link could be established between the use of transediting and the participants' declarative and procedural knowledge.

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