ABSTRACT
This article sets out to chart various aspects of the relationship between COVID-19 fake news and the process of translation by analyzing how several English-language deceptive reports were rendered into Romanian. In Romania, the emergence of the novel coronavirus coincided with a surge of interest in the fake news phenomenon among experts, the wider public, and most notably, the country's authorities, which blocked fake news websites temporarily in an effort to combat the infodemic. However, neither the Decree which instituted this measure nor the existing research into the phenomenon distinguishes between original and translated reports, which led to criticism regarding the extent to which the intent to disinform is provable in the case of such articles. In the present essay, the author argues, through case studies, that the higher the level of human input and localization, the higher the chances that a translated fake news report can successfully be proven to be part of a disinformation agenda.
ABSTRACT
In the first months of 2020, the whole world was affected by the restrictions caused by the authorities' attempts to stop the spread of SarsCov2 as far as possible. Initially, the most effective measure was quarantine, which could slow the spread of the virus. In Romania, the first case of Covid19 was confirmed on 23 February 2020, and after a period of hesitation, the national authorities imposed the quarantine on 15 March, i.e., a series of restrictions on the movement of persons and on participation in events involving more than eight persons. Obviously, the introduction of this special regime for the movement of persons affected all areas of social and economic life, including its vital branches, such as the industrial and educational activity. Of course, under these conditions, the first temptation of any ethnologist was to observe the transformations of the rhythms of life, practicing a kind of armchair ethnography and transforming into the observed "field" even their own home, their own life or the lives of those close to them, but also what came to them from the outside world via online. In contrast to these approaches, this paper studies several cases where, through contractual obligations, the ethnologist had to do the field in the classical sense of the term, i.e. to observe real (not virtual) communities, located far away (even geographically), and to participate in their social and cultural life. The constraints imposed by quarantine practically forced ethnological fieldwork to reinvent itself, making researchers reflect on the criteria for selecting their informants under the new conditions, on the manner of interacting with them, on the logistics involved in producing interviews and, last but not least, on the ethical implications of approaches of this kind. The remote field experiences of two projects were presented and analyzed: Educational and Networking Tools on Development of Authentic Performance for Professional Integration - PAN and Colec.ie digitala a patrimoniului alimentar romanesc.i transfer spre societate - FOODie. Analyzing in particular the interviews conducted in the FOODie project, the paper highlights a number of advantages of remote fieldwork, such as: the possibility to overcome quarantine restrictions, the possibility to make a quality video recording, the openings of a collaborative ethnology. A number of difficulties of this type of remote research are also highlighted, such as: communication difficulties due to lack of direct interaction, internet signal fluctuation problems, difficulties in understanding some aspects due to ignorance of the informant's living space.
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This chapter discusses Romania's COVID-19 journey through the lens of the trade-off between health security and civil liberties. It argues that the Romanian Government's response to the pandemic was less than perfect, partly because of the inadequate legal framework on emergency situations, and partly because of political crises and clashes that plagued Romania since the outbreak of the pandemic. The measures - implemented during an initial two-month State of Emergency, followed by an ongoing State of Alert - ranged from mandatory facemask and social distancing, to obligatory quarantine, to restrictions of movement, to total lockdown. In Romania, only laws can limit civil rights and liberties;Emergency Orders, Government Decisions, or Ministerial Orders cannot restrict these freedoms. Romania implemented long-lasting and very restrictive anti-COVID measures, which constrained such human rights and liberties as freedom of association, freedom of movement, right of education, and freedom/right to vote. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, tourism industry has become a very important sector within the national economy and for this reason, the tourism industry in Romania is considered to have an important role in achieving the objectives defined by the European Commission through the Agenda 2020. The resilience of Romanian tourism to economic crises is characterized by the involvement of all social and age categories in tourist activities, the tourist promotion of Romanian destinations in international circuits, the complexity of the forms of tourism within the destinations in Romania, the expansion of forms of tourism in disadvantaged areas, etc. During the economic crisis caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, tourism represented a means of growth, development and capitalization of rural spaces for the locals because, during the restrictions imposed by the authorities, the majority of tourists chose tourist stays in rural areas due to the calm, peaceful and wonderful scenery with a lot of experiences as horse riding, climbing, hiking, etc. The geographical location of Romania underlines a variety of natural components and landscapes, which outline partly the country's tourist potential: the Romanian Carpathians, the Danube River, the Black Sea with its coastline, the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, the Danube Gorge, flora and fauna of Romania and the man-made landmarks (monasteries, churches, etc.). © 2023, World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic, managed to shed light onto a neglected problem – that of fake news. Even though lockdowns were imposed in most parts of the world, collaboration between researchers across the globe wasn't impeded. Moreover, the lockdown has deprived people of face-to-face interactions and so they shifted towards online communication. This translated into a massive chatting data, which part was true, but fake information also had its share. Therefore, it is of great interest to develop a dataset to try to spot the fake information. RoCoFake comes to address the lack of resources in this domain, by providing a Romanian Covid-19 Fake News dataset, by aggregating various resources available online, like tweets, news titles and fact-checking news sites like factual.ro. This data provides researchers from the medical domain particularly, but not only, with a valuable, open-access data source useful for various research projects. A benchmark for fake news detection is also provided, so that future investigations can compare against our research. Results suggest that even though the dataset is relatively large, improvements can be made by incorporating retweets and comments. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The article provides an overview of the main steps in the development and the follow-up of the ISTROX pilot project developed within the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Planned for 2018–2020, and extended to July 2021 in the context of the Covid pandemic, ISTROX aimed to prepare the ground for a larger envisaged project exploring the history of the Istro-Romanian language (vlaški and žejanski) and community. At the core of ISTROX is a previously unpublished body of sound recordings of IstroRomanian made in Istria during the 1960s by the Oxford linguist Tony Hurren and donated to the University in the 2000s by his wife, Vera Hurren. Part of the approach of ISTROX entailed initiating the online sourcing of linguistic information from the very small community of remaining speakers of ‘Istro-Romanian' worldwide. As the development of the project overlapped with the Covid pandemic, the ISTROX team had to redesign the relationship between the offline and the online elements of the project – a process which is being reoriented towards the offline in post-pandemic context. © 2022, Publishing House of the Romanian Academy. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic, managed to shed light onto a neglected problem – that of fake news. Even though lockdowns were imposed in most parts of the world, collaboration between researchers across the globe wasn't impeded. Moreover, the lockdown has deprived people of face-to-face interactions and so they shifted towards online communication. This translated into a massive chatting data, which part was true, but fake information also had its share. Therefore, it is of great interest to develop a dataset to try to spot the fake information. RoCoFake comes to address the lack of resources in this domain, by providing a Romanian Covid-19 Fake News dataset, by aggregating various resources available online, like tweets, news titles and fact-checking news sites like factual.ro. This data provides researchers from the medical domain particularly, but not only, with a valuable, open-access data source useful for various research projects. A benchmark for fake news detection is also provided, so that future investigations can compare against our research. Results suggest that even though the dataset is relatively large, improvements can be made by incorporating retweets and comments. © 2022 IEEE.
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Online commerce was defined by most as the winner of this period, which was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, when offline stores closed in many sectors, as well as restaurants, cafes and bars, but also schools. The pandemic thus forced the world to digitize itself, and adaptation to the new reality meant the persistence of online shopping behavior. This can also be seen in the numbers. More specifically, data from the National Institute of Statistics show that retail sales through contract houses or via the Internet increased by almost 40% in the first half of 2020 compared to the first half. 2020 compared to 2019. The pace moderated (7-13%) in January and February 2020 (compared to the same months in 2019) and increased to 27% in March 2020 when the state of emergency was declared in mid of year. Month. Then progress galloped, peaking at 75% in April 2020, after which the pace slowed in May and June 2020 without falling below 50%.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, tourism industry has become a very important sector within the national economy and for this reason, the tourism industry in Romania is considered to have an important role in achieving the objectives defined by the European Commission through the Agenda 2020. The resilience of Romanian tourism to economic crises is characterized by the involvement of all social and age categories in tourist activities, the tourist promotion of Romanian destinations in international circuits, the complexity of the forms of tourism within the destinations in Romania, the expansion of forms of tourism in disadvantaged areas, etc. During the economic crisis caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, tourism represented a means of growth, development and capitalization of rural spaces for the locals because, during the restrictions imposed by the authorities, the majority of tourists chose tourist stays in rural areas due to the calm, peaceful and wonderful scenery with a lot of experiences as horse riding, climbing, hiking, etc. The geographical location of Romania underlines a variety of natural components and landscapes, which outline partly the country's tourist potential: the Romanian Carpathians, the Danube River, the Black Sea with its coastline, the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, the Danube Gorge, flora and fauna of Romania and the man-made landmarks (monasteries, churches, etc.). © 2023, World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society. All rights reserved.
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The paper presents an open-domain Question Answering system for Romanian, answering COVID-19 related questions. The QA system pipeline involves automatic question processing, automatic query generation, web searching for the top 10 most relevant documents and answer extraction using a fine-tuned BERT model for Extractive QA, trained on a COVID-19 data set that we have manually created. The paper will present the QA system and its integration with the Romanian language technologies portal RELATE, the COVID-19 data set and different evaluations of the QA performance. © 2022, Institute for Bulgarian Language. All rights reserved.
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Understanding the relationship between online media and vaccine-related information is essential for public inoculation strategies. Despite the advent of automated methods for this purpose, there is a gap in terms of applying Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP) to understand information regarding COVID-19 vaccines in Romanian online news. In this sense, this pilot study aims to close the gap by using NLP techniques to analyze information related to vaccines in online news articles. A corpus of 5,670 vaccine-related online news articles published between January and December 2021 was analyzed using sentiment and word cloud analyses to understand the valence and content of COVID-19 vaccine -related information. The results indicate the utility of the proposed method for public and private actors, as well as further required efforts for using NLP techniques to understand and monitor information regarding vaccines present in Romanian online news articles.
ABSTRACT
Informing patients and obtaining valid informed consent were significant challenges for the COVID-19 immunization program. In Romania, the authorities issued a strategy for activities regarding vaccination against COVID-19, including the informed consent procedure. The lack of legal preparedness was evident when the medical personnel at the vaccination centers were provided with informed consent forms that did not respect the existing legal requirements. In addition, the protocol for persons seeking vaccination stated that the patient was supposed to receive the informed consent form from the receptionist in order to read and sign it. We analyzed the legal implications and the malpractice litigation risk associated with this practice. Due to essential deficiencies and in the absence of an official enactment of new regulations, we conclude that the vaccination consent process did not comply with the legal requirements. Implications include medical personnel's legal liability, loss of malpractice insurance coverage, and public mistrust that may have contributed to a low vaccination rate. Given the potential of future pandemics or other health crises, this may be a valuable lesson for developing better legal strategies.
ABSTRACT
Socio-cultural patterns and communication styles differ from culture to culture. As such, the way in which people deal with a crisis situation is also culture-dependent. The COVID-19 pandemic has pointed, once more, to the cultural diversity of the world through a variety of reactions to the measures imposed by the global spread of the deadly virus. The present research aims at identifying the feelings, coping behaviors and communication patterns of the younger Romanian generation during the COVID-19 pandemic and at explaining them from a cultural standpoint, in an effort to raise awareness of the cultural (un)predictability of human reactions to certain external stimuli. The survey conducted online on 409 students at Politehnica University of TimiÈoara (Romania) revealed that most of students' socio-cultural behavior could have been anticipated by the Romanian authorities when they decided a certain pandemic action plan, and that the few unexpected results indicate the versatility of a culture that is still changing under the Western European influence caused by the fact that Romania has adhered to European Union principles for more than fifteen years.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Adaptation, Psychological , COVID-19/epidemiology , Emotions , Humans , Pandemics , Romania/epidemiology , StudentsABSTRACT
According to Singh (2005: 25) any change in a language goes through two phases: the innovation itself, and then dissemination. According to him, the first step is enriching the lexicon of a language, that is to say transforming it, making it as rich and as diverse as possible. [...]these remarks are commonsensical because if we are to look at what happens during the history of any language or rather if we are to follow the evolution of any lexicon, we are going to notice that language does not rush to come up with new words or coin new terms. At present one can notice a tendency towards foreignization which comes from the loan translation of structures from the source language or as a consequence of lexical borrowing. [...]certain terms may have come to the stage that Pym (2004:37) calls glocalized. (1) dinosaur = Greek dino 'terrible' + Greek saur 'lizard' (2) submarine = Latin sub 'under' + Latin marin- 'sea' (3) telephone = Greek tele 'far' + Greek phone 'voice' (4) telescope = Greek tele 'far' + Greek scope 'watcher' (5) stethoscope = Greek stetho 'breast/chest' + Greek scope 'watcher' (6) bronchoscope = Greek broncho 'windpipe' + Greek scope 'watcher' Both tele and scope have become part of hybrid compounds such as television and flouroscope, which include words borrowed from Old French (vision ultimately from Latin) and Latin (flouro from Latin fluere 'to flow').
ABSTRACT
The aim of our study is to study the propensity of teachers and students on the continuous use of digital resources post-pandemic, based on the experiences of the lockdown time. We discovered that this special transformation led to a "forced innovation" situation explained by a rethinking and reinventing of learning paths, as we intended to map this ongoing phenomenon. Our results show that UMPhST members have medium digital propensity level therefore have interest and initiatives to use E-learning systems after the pandemic. This study marks a starting point for developing a digital propensity index applicable in academic field.
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Internationalisation is a desired goal for contemporary universities, which are increasingly using concepts like cultural diversity or globalism as selling points to attract students. However, these concepts are not always clearly defined in terms of underlying values and lived experience. We used a corpus linguistics approach to extract university descriptors of the term internationalisation. For that purpose, we compiled the INTER corpus (Corpus of Internationalisation Terminology in Higher Education Institutions in Europe), which includes texts extracted from the websites of 50 European Universities. We analyse the lexical profile of the tokens semantically connected to the concept of internationalisation . To verify whether the advertised concepts of internationalisation match the lived experience of the students, we use a second corpus, LIVIT (Corpus of Lived Internationalisation Experiences), which includes 300 testimonies of student mobility. All data and analyses capture the pre-COVID situation and are intended to inform the post-COVID university policymaking. © HEAd 2022. All Rights Reserved.
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There is consensus on the fact that COVID-19 crisis goes far beyond its medical roots and poses great challenges for entrepreneurs all over the world. Not only specific business models are provoked, but also the underlying principles of our economic and social system, based on human interaction and consumption as prerequisite for growth, prosperity and well-being. The pressure on the public system, national and international institutions and authorities, which were urged to come with rapid solutions and answers in order to bail-out and support the entrepreneurial ecosystem is enormous. The present paper aims at investigating the main challenges faced by Romanian entrepreneurs and the support schemes and public measures, as they were perceived by the interviewed persons, owners of small and medium-sized enterprises from Romania. After delivering a brief introduction of the specific features of the Romanian entrepreneurial environment and the impact of COVID-19 crisis on Romanian companies, the paper focuses on the policies and support measures offered by the state. Different categories of support schemes are depicted and critically analyzed within the broader European context, but also from the perspective of several Romanian entrepreneurs, target population of the aforementioned measures, participants in a qualitative study, based on in-depth interviews, conducted in the time framework July- December 2020. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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The unexpected outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown which followed led to an interruption in education worldwide and a major shift towards online mode of teaching. The global context has multiplied in Romania, creating new challenges and opportunities in a traditional and restrained teaching setting. The present study explores the specific trends of online teaching methods used during the pandemic in Romania in four higher education institutions and analyses the perceptions from the perspectives of the students, academic staff, support personnel and external stakeholders towards new teaching methods and educational policy decisions. In opposition to the theoretical advantages on the technology-based teaching methods, the article captures the reasons of the anxiety in applying these methods in an unprepared social and teaching context and shows the socio-political background in the preferences of teaching strategies at individual and collective level. In our article we interpret the main results of a qualitative inquiry we conducted in October-November 2021. Our goal was to find out how Romanian universities adapted to online teaching during COVID and how they mastered the challenges they encountered. During the research, we organized 32 interviews (online or face-to-face) in four relevant Romanian universities: a top Romanian university, a middle size university with regional impact, a local private university, and an externally funded private institution. All our respondents are related to the field of social-science For the analysis of the responses, we used the inductive thematic analysis described by M. Bloor,et al (2001).The objective was to find out the perception of the stakeholders of the current unplanned educational shift on learning outcomes, stress level and pedagogical shift. We interviewed external stakeholders as well to compare their perceptions vis a vis the views from inside The article highlights the personal reactions and experiences in respect to the educational shift they had encountered. Online teaching and learning practices are related to social, cognitive, and teaching particularities, as such we identified several specificities derived by organizational culture of the Romanian higher education practices. Additionally, our findings from the interviews reveal the need for a comprehensive view of the pedagogy that integrates technology to support teaching and learning, but without a full shift to online education The current study on the recent development of online teaching and learning practices in Romanian universities shows the responses, highlighting future directions for hybrid education and points of improvement in Romania.
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In the context of the economic uncertainty generated at the national level and caused not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, for a healthy evolution of business relations in the competitive environment, for resilience and survival in this context of the pandemic and efforts to counteract possible financial losses, optimal risk management plays a key role in the banking system to avoid excessive exposure with a negative impact on financial performance. The present research aimed to provide an analysis of the potential relationship between the competition presented on the example of the Romanian banking market ( before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and after its start), risk management in terms of risk-weighted assets (credit risk, market risk and operational risk), on one hand, and the profitability of the banking system measured by the ROA (return on assets) indicator, on the other. In order to test the formulated hypotheses, the authors used a predominantly quantitative research methodology based on a statistically deductive analysis with a series of testing objectives and potential cause- effect links. The results of this study indicate, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the existence of a significant intensity correlation between the banks' exposure to the total risk ( RWA) (risk-weighted assets) and the market share (as dependent variables) and the banking performance indicator (ROA) (as an independent variable) and, after the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, banks' exposure to the credit risk, together with the position on the banking market.
ABSTRACT
The news site ro.sputnik.md is the Romanian language version of the Sputnik news website platform, owned by the Russian government, one of the main channels used by the Kremlin to disseminate mis- and disinformation across Russian borders. To map the media frames and the lexical and discursive constructions, the research proposes a mixed methods content-based approach, where automated text analysis (frequency, co-occurrence, n-grams) is combined with thematic and discourse analysis. Six emphasis frames are identified in the corpus (N=1,165): Superiority of the Russian Sputnik V Vaccine, Fatal/Side Effects of EU Authorized Vaccines, Limitations of Individual Rights and Freedoms, EU and/or Romanian Authorities' Struggle, Children and Teenagers' Protection, and Big Pharma Conspiracy. The findings show that specific discursive patterns are associated with the negative news value: death, side effects (blood clot, thrombosis, coagulation), restrictions, and interdictions or warnings (serious, risk, negative, panic, etc.), while the conflict news value is associated with warfare vocabulary (defense, threat, battle, fire, gunpowder, etc.);and eliteness, with well-known actors (state leaders, European leaders, famous "conspirators") and countries (powerful international actors, meaningful neighbours).