Parallel Text Corpora Research Articles

On Difficulties of Compiling Parallel Corpus of Socio-Political Terms

The paper describes the process of compiling an online bilingual dictionary of socio-political terms and problems facing the lexicographer. It illustrates the challenges with the compilation of the parallel corpus of socio-political texts as the ideological evaluation influences the word choice in English- and Russian-speaking news media. The work began with the creation of LSP corpora of media texts on political and social issues in English and Russian and involved extraction of lexical information via the Sketch Engine tool. There is an attempt to describe a new format of a reference book - a rather large, semi-crowdsourced, mostly-datamined dictionary of English-Russian socio-political lexicon.

Neural-based Machine Translation for Medical Text Domain. Based on European Medicines Agency Leaflet Texts

The quality of machine translation is rapidly evolving. Today one can find several machine translation systems on the web that provide reasonable translations, although the systems are not perfect. In some specific domains, the quality may decrease. A recently proposed approach to this domain is neural machine translation. It aims at building a jointly-tuned single neural network that maximizes translation performance, a very different approach from traditional statistical machine translation. Recently proposed neural machine translation models often belong to the encoder-decoder family in which a source sentence is encoded into a fixed length vector that is, in turn, decoded to generate a translation. The present research examines the effects of different training methods on a Polish-English Machine Translation system used for medical data. The European Medicines Agency parallel text corpus was used as the basis for training of neural and statistical network-based translation systems. The main machine translation evaluation metrics have also been used in analysis of the systems. A comparison and implementation of a real-time medical translator is the main focus of our experiments.

Making numerical information more accessible

Are rounded numbers easier to understand than exact numbers? Information in newspapers often takes the form of numerical expressions which pose comprehension problems for many people, including people with disabilities, low literacy levels or lack of access to advanced technology. The purpose of this paper is to motivate and describe a rule-based lexical component that simplifies numerical expressions in Spanish texts. We propose a simplification approach that makes news articles more accessible to readers with specials needs by rewriting difficult numerical expressions in a simpler way. We carried out a study that identifies powerful simplification strategies to simplify numerical information in a text by analysing a parallel corpus of original texts and their manual simplifications. The study is complemented with an analysis of simplifications obtained in response to a questionnaire where subjects were asked to produce simplifications of numerical expressions in context. Finally, we implemented and evaluated a simplification system that mimics the simplification strategies that were found to be effective.

Animal Metaphors and Idioms in the Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

In this study we examine the metaphoric mentions of three wild animals considered to be most important in the Slavic popular tradition, namely the wolf, the bear and the hare, in a Bulgarian–Ukrainian parallel corpus. Our goal is to see what meanings are found most often, how well images from alien world views are accepted by the Bulgarian and the Ukrainian linguistic consciousness, and how translators replace images which are likely not to be interpreted in the desired way.

El euro y sus reflejos lingüísticos en italiano y español (2002-2013): estudio contrastivo

This paper analyzes contrastively materials of a parallel corpus of journalistic texts collected in 2002 (year of introduction of the euro) and 2013. We have extracted over 200 lexical units (145 Italian, 61 Spanish), most of them compounds with the prefixoid euro-. This analysis has revealed differences and similarities of the two languages in the area of word formation. The study has been completed with the examination of euro- compounds found in Spanish and Italian lexicographical sources.

Linguistic Corpora as International Cultural Heritage: The Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

The paper relates about our ongoing work on the creation of a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts. We discuss some differences in the approaches and the interpretation of some concepts, as well as various problems associated with the construction of our corpus, in particular the occasional ‘nonparallelism’ of original and translated texts. We give examples of the a pplication of the parallel corpus for the study of lexical semantics and note the outstanding role of the corpus in the lexicographic description of Ukrainian and Bulgarian translation equivalents. We draw attention to the importance of creating parallel corpora as objects of national as well as global cultural heritage.

A multidimensional approach to aligned sentences in translated text

Using unsupervised clustering techniques this study explores sentence alignment patterns in a parallel corpus of Norwegian source texts and Spanish translations, the NSPC (Hareide and Hofland 2012). The results show that three strategies with respect to sentence alignment dominate: one to one correspondence, merging two sentences into one, and removing sentences altogether (omission). The strategies are intricately correlated with the variables translator , author , and genre . However, we show how visualization techniques for cluster analyses offer a possibility for teasing apart these interactions as well as their relative importance. Our results indicate that non-fiction texts allow translators more freedom with respect to the treatment of sentences than do texts that are written by professional authors of fiction. The style of the author appears to play only a secondary role, but is especially important in fiction. Keywords: corpus based translation, cluster analysis, parallel corpora, corpus alignment, unidirectional bilingual corpus

From Regularities to Norms in the Secondary Formation of Romanian ICT Terms

Abstract Starting from a parallel corpus of general use texts, this article investigates what kind of regularities are discernible in the formation of the terms used in the Romanian language of information and communication technology (ICT). After a brief presentation of the corpus that supported this research, the article begins with an introduction to the distinction made between the processes of primary and secondary term formation and considers it in relation to the concepts of translation regularities and norms as theorized by Gideon Toury. Starting from a concise examination of the sentence-based turn in translation studies, the final part of the article analyzes the main strategies used in the secondary formation of Romanian ICT terms (borrowing, loan translation, hybrid formation, and translation proper) and attempts to determine which of them could be seen as regularities that ampler studies could confirm as norms in this process.

A New English?Arabic Parallel Text Corpus for Lexicographic Applications

Bilingual lexicographers, translation specialists and English teachers in the Arabworld do not have access to computerized corpora of parallel texts for the English–Arabic languagepair. This project has been carried out to meet this requirement by establishing the first generalparallel corpus of English texts and their Arabic translations. The first phase of the project involvedthe selection of general source texts having appropriate lexical and stylistic features. The chosensource texts deal with a variety of topics such as the environment, globalization, psychology, history,politics, drama, etc. Their Arabic translations were taken from The World of Knowledge seriespublished by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Kuwait.Keywords: PARALLEL CORPUS, LEXICOGRAPHY, TRANSLATION, BILINGUAL DICTIONARY,COLLOCATIONS, ALIGNMENT, SYNONYMS, DERIVATIVES, ANTONYMS, GLOSSARY,FREQUENCYOpsomming: 'n Nuwe Engels–Arabiese parallelletekskorpus vir leksikografiesetoepassings Tweetalige leksikograwe, vertaalkundiges en Engelsonderwysers in dieArabiese wêreld het nie toegang tot gerekenariseerde korpusse van parallelle tekste vir die Engels–Arabiese taalpaar nie. Hierdie projek is onderneem om in dié behoefte te voorsien deur die eerstealgemene parallelle korpus van Engelse tekste en hul Arabiese vertalings tot stand te bring. Dieeerste fase van die projek het die keuse van algemene brontekste behels wat geskikte leksikale enstilistiese eienskappe besit. Die gekose brontekste handel oor 'n verskeidenheid onderwerpe soosdie omgewing, globalisering, psigologie, geskiedenis, politiek, drama, ens. Hul Arabiese vertalingsis geneem uit The World of Knowledge-reeks gepubliseer deur die National Council for Culture, Artsand Letters (NCCAL) in Koeweit.Sleutelwoorde: PARALLELLE KORPUS, LEKSIKOGRAFIE, VERTALING, TWEETALIGEWOORDEBOEK, KOLLOKASIES, OOREENSTEMMING, SINONIEME, AFLEIDINGS, ANTONIEME,GLOSSARIUM, FREKWENSIE

DOCUMENT TRANSLATION RETRIEVAL BASED ON STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES

We compare different strategies to apply statistical machine translation techniques in order to retrieve documents that are a plausible translation of a given source document. Finding the translated version of a document is a relevant task; for example, when building a corpus of parallel texts that can help to create and evaluate new machine translation systems. In contrast to the traditional settings in cross-language information retrieval tasks, in this case both the source and the target text are long and, thus, the procedure used to select which words or phrases will be included in the query has a key effect on the retrieval performance. In the statistical approach explored here, both the probability of the translation and the relevance of the terms are taken into account in order to build an effective query.

A new English–Arabic parallel text corpus for lexicographic applications

Bilingual lexicographers, translation specialists and English teachers in the Arab world do not have access to computerized corpora of parallel texts for the English–Arabic language pair. This project has been carried out to meet this requirement by establishing the first general parallel corpus of English texts and their Arabic translations. The first phase of the project involved the selection of general source texts having appropriate lexical and stylistic features. The chosen source texts deal with a variety of topics such as the environment, globalization, psychology, history, politics, drama, etc. Their Arabic translations were taken from The World of Knowledge series published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Kuwait. Keywords: parallel corpus, lexicography, translation, bilingual dictionary, collocations, alignment, synonyms, derivatives, antonyms, glossary, frequency

Translating medical terminologies through word alignment in parallel text corpora

Developing international multilingual terminologies is a time-consuming process. We present a methodology which aims to ease this process by automatically acquiring new translations of medical terms based on word alignment in parallel text corpora, and test it on English and French. After collecting a parallel, English–French corpus, we detected French translations of English terms from three terminologies—MeSH, SNOMED CT and the MedlinePlus Health Topics. We obtained respectively for each terminology 74.8%, 77.8% and 76.3% of linguistically correct new translations. A sample of the MeSH translations was submitted to expert review and 61.5% were deemed desirable additions to the French MeSH. In conclusion, we successfully obtained good quality new translations, which underlines the suitability of using alignment in text corpora to help translating terminologies. Our method may be applied to different European languages and provides a methodological framework that may be used with different processing tools.

Explicitness in translation and interpreting: A critical review and some empirical evidence (of an elusive concept)

In this paper, we will try to grasp the elusive and controversial concept of explicitness which has been considered from different perspectives in linguistics and will take a special look at different approaches in translation and interpretation studies. Thereby, the often postulated assumption that explicitness is a universal feature appearing in all kinds and all instances of language mediation will be questioned. We will show that explicitness does not result from the translation or interpreting process per se but that other factors (also) need to be taken into account, especially conventional differences between the languages involved and the different interpreting strategies of the interpreters. Our investigation is based on data from a parallel corpus of German-English popular science texts and a corpus of interpreter-mediated discourse in a conference setting.

Demonstratives in parallel texts: a case study

The aim of this paper is to show the usefulness of parallel texts for typological inves-tigations. In order to analyze the way in which demonstrative systems of the European languages function, two kinds of data have been considered: first, the results of a questionnaire based on situations represented in 48 pictures, which will be necessarily discussed only in a summarized way here. Second, and this will be the main topic of this paper, a corpus of parallel texts: the translations, in different languages of Europe, of the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Parallel texts have been used to verify the generalizations based on the data elicited through the questionnaire.

Analysing the English-Xhosa parallel corpus of technical texts with Paraconc: a case study of term formation processes

The aim of this article is to show how corpus-based research, using computer tools can contribute to the development of technical terminology for Xhosa by translators. Paraconc has been used in analysing a parallel corpus of English-Xhosa texts. Paraconc is a parallel concordancer which makes it easy to analyse translated texts. This software program was developed by Michael Barlow (1995, 2003). He designed this software for linguists and translators who wish to work with translated texts. The alignment process, which is very important for the successful operation of this software, creates links between the source text and the target text. Some screenshots which show alignment of texts at sentence level, merging and splitting of sentences, word frequency lists, parallel concordances, etc. are cited. The author further demonstrates how parallel concordancing, and to a lesser extent, sentence alignment in Paraconc, have been used for identifying terms in the English-Xhosa Parallel Corpus.

English as Lingua Franca in Covert Translation Processes

The project described in this paper deals with the role played by global English in initiating language change via language contact in translation and multilingual text production. The paper presents the theoretical background, the analytical procedure, the corpus and first results of this project, which is currently carried out within the Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Mehrsprachigkeit’ (Research Centre on Multilingualism) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation). The working hypothesis underlying this project is that the increasing dominance of the English language as a global lingua franca impacts on translations from English into other major European languages and on parallel text production. In order to test this hypothesis, a multilingual corpus of translation and parallel texts in three genres was compiled and, as a first step, subjected to in-depth qualitative analysis and comparison on the basis of a systemic-functional evaluation model. The purpose of these analyses is to find out whether linguistic and cultural specificity in target text communicative conventions tends to give way to typical Anglophone conventions. Following an outline of the model of analysis and the corpus, major results of the analyses of English source texts and their German translations are presented and discussed.

TWO APPROACHES TO AUTOMATED TEXT ALIGNING OF PARALLEL FICTION TEXTS

Parallel text corpora supply researchers with data for multilingual lexicographic research, translation studies, and language typology. The objectives of the ParRus research project at the University of Tampere are to compile a Russian-Finnish parallel corpus and to develop the software for the maintenance of the corpus. Text aligning is the crucial problem in compiling parallel corpora. The study of parallel texts shows that, in most cases, the translator retains paragraphs of the original in the translation. The Source Language – Target Language quotient (ratio of number of words in originals to number of words in translations) is also a stable value. The aligning programme developed at the Department compares original with translation, paragraph by paragraph, adding new paragraphs to the extracts being aligned until the extracts match the SL-TL quotient. The system only produces good results if the translation is structurally close to the original. However, the study of parallel texts shows that frequency of words and their translation equivalents does not usually match. Therefore, paragraphs and larger text units are the only elements of formal text structure which can be used for comparing parallel texts, unless knowledge structures are exploited.