Cross-lingual Translation Research Articles

Between Calligraphic Untranslatability and Symbolic Translatability: Xu Bing’s Pictographic Art

ABSTRACT Emily Apter’s conception of the “untranslatable” taps into the dynamics and difficulties of translation between languages and cultures. The process of translation is described as a “intransigent nub of meaning that triggers endless translating in response to its resistant singularity.” When words are taken out of their context, the idiosyncratic meaning is obliterated and revamped. On the one hand, different from the Derridean critique of Western logocentric bias of writing, Chinese characters, particularly written in the form of calligraphy, are faced with great challenges when they need to be translated into other non-pictographic languages. The strokes, pauses, structures, ink tones and sizes in Chinese calligraphy all contribute to the meaning of the text imminent to the artist’s spatiotemporal situation and fluctuations of his/her mental state. To a large extent, the calligraphic art resists the temptation of translation, either into other languages, or into Chinese characters in print. On the other hand, Chinese characters with their pictographic quality have the potential to transcend the phonocentric confines of languages and are possible to be translated into a universal language. The Chinese artist Xu Bing 徐冰 plays with the calligraphic form of Chinese characters in his artworks. In his project Book from the Sky 天書 (Tianshu), he extracts the strokes and radicals from the Chinese characters and rearranges them into new artificial and meaningless ones, containing the imagist form and obliterating the meaning. In Book from the Ground 地書 (Dishu), Xu uses symbols from the public sphere and makes them into a book, which is accessible to people of different linguistic backgrounds. I argue that by playing with the Chinese characters as pictographic signs and other public signs, Xu Bing’s artistic practices challenge the border between the singular and the universal, and the translatable and the untranslatable, rendering implications for the cross-lingual translation.

English-Persian Plagiarism Detection based on a Semantic Approach

Plagiarism which is defined as “the wrongful appropriation of other writers’ or authors’ works and ideas without citing or informing them” poses a major challenge to knowledge spread publication. Plagiarism has been placed in four categories of direct, paraphrasing (rewriting), translation, and combinatory. This paper addresses translational plagiarism which is sometimes referred to as cross-lingual plagiarism. In cross-lingual translation, writers meld a translation with their own words and ideas. Based on monolingual plagiarism detection methods, this paper ultimately intends to find a way to detect cross-lingual plagiarism. A framework called Multi-Lingual Plagiarism Detection (MLPD) has been presented for cross-lingual plagiarism analysis with ultimate objective of detection of plagiarism cases. English is the reference language and Persian materials are back translated using translation tools. The data for assessment of MLPD were obtained from English-Persian Mizan parallel corpus. Apache’s Solr was also applied to record the creep of the documents and their indexation. The accuracy mean of the proposed method revealed to be 98.82% when employing highly accurate translation tools which indicate the high accuracy of the proposed method. Also, Google translation service showed the accuracy mean to be 56.9%. These tests demonstrate that improved translation tools enhance the accuracy of the proposed method.

Translating Style: Constraints and Creativity

Style is an important factor to be considered in cross-cultural, cross-lingual translation. There are three factors that work subtle constraints on the style of the translated text: competence for analyzing authorial style, weighing “manner” against “matter”, and literary traditions in target culture. Despite such constraints, the translator’s artistic pursuit finds expressions in creativity. The style of the target text is, therefore, a product of both the original author and the translator, a fact that qualifies the translator to share with the original author the authorship to the work he has helped transplanted into the target culture.

An integrated information retrieval support system for campus network

This paper presents a new integrated information retrieval support system (IIRSS) which can help Web search engines retrieve cross-lingual information from heterogeneous resources stored in multi-databases in Intranet. The IIRSS, with a three-layer architecture, can cooperate with other application servers running in Intranet. By using intelligent agents to collect information and to create indexes on-the-fly, using an access control strategy to confine a user to browsing those accessible documents for him/her through a single portal, and using a new cross-lingual translation tool to help the search engine retrieve documents, the new system provides controllable information access with different authorizations, personalized services, and real-time information retrieval.