Scientific Writing in Portuguese by Hispanic speaking: Linguistic-computer resources based on Methods of parallel text alignments.

Abstract

Although Brazil is not a country that attracts a large quantity of foreign students, as the United States, France, Britain and Germany do, it has programs coordinated by CAPES and CNPq that motivate graduate studies in federal and state Brazilian institutions. For instance, at São Paulo University, specifically on São Carlos campus, the number of foreign students, mainly those whose mother tongue is Spanish, is high. This number has increased over recent years. The Spanish-speaking students need to write dissertations and theses in Portuguese, as well as present them in that language. Writing and speaking, which are production skills, are more difficult when compared to the reception skills (reading and listening). The writing of scientific texts is a complex process, which becomes even more complicated when those must be written in a foreign language. Although there are tools for writing theses and dissertations in Portuguese using the knowledge of rhetorical structure of scientific texts, the hypothesis in this doctoral research is that there still exist unresolved problems concerning the use of these tools to Support Scientific Writing, to write academic texts in Portuguese for Spanish speakers. The present thesis aims to analyze the problems native Spanish speakers have to write theses and dissertations in Portuguese, considering the main interference (tirar of) these Spanish users keep when writing in Portuguese. The main idea is to create a metric system to assess the complexity of the problems of understanding caused by the marks in Spanish in scientific texts. The research (tirar vírgula) also aims to evaluate the results of the methods and resources based on aligned parallel corpora in the area of Support Systems Writing, to assist the post-editing of a scientific text written in Portuguese by a user whose mother tongue is Spanish. To validate the hypothesis, some tools will be created for the Support Scientific Writing utilizing the resources above mentioned. These tools will be evaluated by real users.