English Translation Research Articles

The utility of ChatGPT as a generative medical translator.

Large language models continue to dramatically change the medical landscape. We aimed to explore the utility of ChatGPT in providing accurate, actionable, and understandable generative medical translations in English, Spanish, and Mandarin pertaining to Otolaryngology. Responses of GPT-4 to commonly asked patient questions listed on official otolaryngology clinical practice guidelines (CPG) were evaluated with the Patient Education materials Assessment Tool-printable (PEMAT-P.) Additional critical elements were identified a priori to evaluate ChatGPT's accuracy and thoroughness in its responses. Multiple fluent speakers of English, Mandarin, and Spanish evaluated each response generated by ChatGPT. Total PEMAT-P scores differed between English, Mandarin, and Spanish GPT-4 generated responses depicting a moderate effect size of language, Eta-Square 0.07 with scores ranging from 73 to 77 (P-value = 0.03). Overall understandability scores did not differ between English, Mandarin, and Spanish depicting a small effect size of language, Eta-Square 0.02 scores ranging from 76 to 79 (P-value = 0.17), nor did overall actionability scores Eta-Square 0 score ranging 66-73 (P-value = 0.44). Overall a priori procedure-specific responses similarly did not differ between English, Spanish, and Mandarin Eta-Square 0.02 scores ranging 61-78 (P-value = 0.22). GPT-4 produces accurate, understandable, and actionable outputs in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Responses generated by GPT-4 in Spanish and Mandarin are comparable to English counterparts indicating a novel use for these models within Otolaryngology, and implications for bridging healthcare access and literacy gaps. IV.

The Dilemma and Choices of Indirect Translation: The Transformation of Chinese Classical Novels in Europe from the Early Translations of Yu Jiaoli

ABSTRACT Previous studies on the Yu jiaoli 玉嬌梨 (The Two Fair Cousins) often directly compared the English indirect translation with the Chinese original by neglecting the French translation as the intermedia, treating the two translators as one person and collectively referring to them as the “Westerners.” This article reexamines French translation and English indirect translation in the Anglo-French competition in the early 19th century. Influenced by the trend of Academic Sinology established in France and the dominating French way of intellectual trade between China and Europe, the French translation showed more faithfulness than literariness. However, the English translator was faced with the dilemma and choices of translation – relying on Abel-Rémusat’s good reputation and being more faithful to his translation or being deviated from the French translation by intentional mistranslations, abridgment, and deletions of the main text and the paratext under the multiple purposes of economy, politics, business, and culture. The English translator’s unfamiliarity with the Chinese language has inadvertently produced more mistranslations, further increasing the distance from the French translation.

Girmit, intimacy and sexual violence: indentured women on colonial sugar plantations, c. 1834–1917

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the sexual violence against Indian indentured women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on colonial plantations around the world through the lens of intimacy and labour. Beginning in the 1830s, Indian men, women, and children were brought to various overseas plantations by colonial planters under the indenture system, which was designed to fill the labour shortage that resulted from the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. This essay uses the petitions, depositions and letters of indentured women---available in colonial archives in both their native Indian languages and in English translation---to argue that the violence against women was not only perpetuated by plantation authorities but equally by Indian male indentured workers. The paper identifies two forms of violence on the plantations: colonial violence related to racial hierarchy and control over the subjugated subject and patriarchal violence related to Indian social control and domination. Each type of violence was related to intimacy, i.e. closeness of people on plantations. While colonial violence was enacted through power relations, the Indian male violence was enacted through imposition of the patriarchal norms.

Making things specific: towards an anthropology of everyday ethics in healthcare.

This paper is the English translation and adaptation of my inaugural lecture in Amsterdam for the Chair Anthropology of Everyday Ethics in Health Care. I argue that the challenges in health care may look daunting and unsolvable in their scale and complexity, but that it helps to consider these problems in their specificity, while accepting that some problems may not be solved but have become chronic. The paper provides reflections on how to develop a scientific approach that does not aim to eradicate bad things but explores ways in which to live with them. Crucial in this quest is the attention to how we conceptualize problems, and whether this is specific enough for addressing present day concerns. I propose an anthropology of everyday ethics as a way to study people's everyday ways of handling a variety of goods in practice. I draw specific attention to exploring aesthetic values in everyday life amongst these, values that are used abundantly to qualify events in everyday life but rarely theorized in philosophy or social science.

An optimal framework for natural English translate processing: On the application of artificial neural network and Adam optimization algorithm

Traditional rule-based and statistical methods have limitations when dealing with complex language structures and semantics. In neural network machine translation algorithms, the objective function is usually to improve the accuracy of n-ary words. However, this does not guarantee a more natural and accurate translation. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes an optimization algorithm for English natural translation processing based on neural networks, which combines Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Transformer models. In GAN, the generative model uses the Transformer model to generate false samples, while the discriminative model uses a binary classifier based on convolutional neural networks and attention mechanisms to distinguish between true and false samples. During the training process, reinforcement learning algorithms are added to evaluate and adjust the generated sentences, and the parameters of the generated model are updated. The classification results of the discriminative model are used together with the Bilingual Evaluation Basis Value (BLEU) objective function to evaluate false samples, and the results are fed back to the generating model to guide parameter updates and optimization. Extensive experiments were conducted on a standard English-Chinese machine translation dataset to evaluate our method. Compared with the benchmark model that only uses supervised learning methods, our neural network-based optimization algorithm for English natural translation processing has achieved significant improvements in translation quality. According to statistical comparison, compared with the Transformer model (BLUE = 33.63 and AP = 90%) and the deep learning model based on long-term and short-term memory (BLUE = 30.26 and AP = 83%), the GAN and Transformer models proposed as the best framework exhibit better performance in bilingual evaluation deficiency (BLEU) (34.35) and accuracy (AP = 95%).

On Freedom from Remorse (Avipratisāra/Avippaṭisāra): Its Place on the Well-Trodden Path from Moral Discipline to Samādhi Meditation

AbstractThe primary objective of this study is to shed light on the role and significance of freedom from remorse (avipratisāra/avippaṭisāra) in the cultivation of Buddhist concentration (samādhi) meditation. The study delves into the progression from avipratisāra/avippaṭisāra to samādhi, examining how moral discipline influences an individual’s conscience and, consequently, meditation. We commence by examining the well-established path of cultivation leading toward samādhi. A comprehensive study was undertaken to understand the term avipratisāra/avippaṭisāra, its significance for Buddhist meditation, the context in which it originated, and the various English translations that have been provided for it. Furthermore, a comparison is made between avipratisāra/avippaṭisāra and a seemingly synonymous term, kaukṛtya/kukkucca, with areas being sought where one or the other tends to be (or is exclusively) used within the discourse about Buddhist ethics and meditation. From various Buddhist scriptures, it is suggested that a morally disciplined individual typically progresses through a series of states, starting with freedom from remorse and potentially leading to concentration (samādhi). Avipratisāra/avippaṭisāra is pivotal in fostering positive meditative states, serving as a catalyst that propels individuals from negative emotions to wholesome ones on the Buddhist path. By contrast, both vipratisāra/vippaṭisāra and kaukṛtya/kukkucca are identified as basically synonymous words for disturbing emotions with somewhat different contexts of use, the elimination of such emotions being necessary if individuals are to progress on their spiritual journey. Avipratisāra/avippaṭisāra plays a crucial intermediary role bridging Buddhist ethics and meditation. Moral discipline and the subsequent understanding and confession of any personal misconduct are integral to fostering freedom from remorse. Such freedom not only paves the way to deeper meditation but also fortifies one’s confidence in Buddhist teachings, and so provides a foundation for true spiritual progress.

Ibn Sīnā, “Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ 6–10”

ABSTRACT This is the first English translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna) Commentary on Chapters 6-10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics Λ. It is significant as it is one of only a small number of surviving commentaries by Ibn Sīnā and offers crucial insights into not only his attitudes towards his predecessors, but also his own philosophical positions — especially with regard to the human intellect's connections to God and the cosmos — and his attempt to develop a distinctive mode of commentary.

Established and emerging theatre pharmacy services: a scoping review

Abstract Introduction Guidelines recommend that pharmacists contribute to perioperative patient care.[1,2] Expansion of perioperative pharmacy services was considered in Tallaght University Hospital following the appointment of a Critical Care & Anaesthesia Chief II Pharmacist. Preliminary research indicated that activities at surgical pre-assessment clinics, in critical care and on inpatient wards are well-documented, while theatre pharmacy services appear comparatively under-developed. Pharmacists are well-placed to promote the safe and cost-effective use of medicines in this high-risk environment. An understanding of the evidence base could provide a foundation on which pharmacy departments seeking to expand their clinical services can build. Aim To determine the range, extent and nature of theatre pharmacy services internationally, and to describe any reported outcomes of these services. Methods This scoping review was conducted and reported as per the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and the PRISMA-ScR checklist. The review protocol was registered on Open Science Framework. A search was conducted across electronic (Ovid® MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL and PsycInfo) and grey literature databases (Google Scholar, BASE, CADTH, and Google) without limitations on date of publication, study type or language (where English translation available). A manual search of the citation lists of all included publications supplemented the electronic search. One reviewer screened titles and abstracts and carried out data extraction, with a 10% sample screened by a second reviewer. Two reviewers evaluated full texts. Critical appraisal was performed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool where appropriate. A narrative approach to evidence synthesis was employed. Extracted data about the type of pharmacy service(s) and associated outcomes were studied to inform development of key concepts through which results were presented. Results Ninety-two publications were included from 3924 results. Fifty-seven were primary research articles. Most publications were descriptive in nature. Over half of the included publications described services in the United States; the remainder were from Australia, several European countries, Egypt, Morocco, Japan, China and Taiwan. The majority of theatre pharmacy services involved medication management, i.e. procurement, spending, storage, formulary development and distribution of medicines. Clinical services incorporated provision of medicines information, protocol and guideline development, antimicrobial stewardship, education and training of healthcare professionals, engagement with health informatics and medication safety projects, practice-based research and intraoperative emergency support. Reported outcomes included financial savings, improved accountability of controlled substances, improved patient safety and staff satisfaction with the service. Many publications highlighted improved inter-departmental relationships between pharmacy and anaesthesiology. Of the 57 primary research articles, 48 lacked a clear research question and so did not satisfy the MMAT screening criteria. Of the nine assessed, adherence to quality criteria ranged from 40-100%. Conclusion Evidence for theatre pharmacy services is extensive and varied. Empirical research of high methodological quality is required to assess the outcomes of these services. Strengths of this review include the use of reporting guidelines and quality appraisal of the evidence. This review may have been limited by the exclusion of non-English language publications. This review collates practical guidance on the development of theatre pharmacy services and highlights facilitators of successful service establishment.

Chesterman’s Pragmatic Strategies in Translating Sundanese Folklore Into English

English scholar and translator Andrew Chesterman offers three major strategies of translation when dealing with any kind of source texts: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. Moreover, these three strategies can be applied either separately or with two or all three of them used together depending on the need to get a natural equivalent in the target text. This article is about the emergence of one of Chesterman’s strategies – the pragmatic strategies - in the translation of Sundanese folklore from the Sundanese language into the English target text. The Sundanese language is a local language spoken by Sundanese people mostly living in West Java, Indonesia. Its existence is in such a critical situation that if there are no efforts from any communities, institutions, or government to preserve it, this local language will gradually go extinct. This research is one of the ways to participate in preserving the language. Using Chesterman’s concept of pragmatic strategies, this research aims to reveal the emergence of each type of pragmatic strategy in the English target text and identify the most dominant strategy used. The method used is a descriptive qualitative method focusing on the use of words either in the linguistic unit of the clause, the phrase or the word itself. The efforts made by the translator in giving the closest natural equivalent in the target text can be observed in the results of this research. The results show that all types of pragmatic strategies were used, but the strategy used most frequently was the explicitness change strategy.

Quality Assessment for The Translations of Museum Texts: A Case Study of The Archaeology and Ethnography Museum of Edirne

Museums have significant roles in promoting and presenting cultural heritage and cultural values in various ways. An intrinsic part of intercultural communication in museums, bilingual museum texts (e.g. labels, brochures, explanatory texts etc.) have become an important field to be investigated within the framework of Translation Studies. In order to make a contribution to the analysis of translation of museum texts, this study aims to provide a quality assessment of English translations of texts in the Archeology and Ethnography Museum of Edirne. Even though English translations of different texts types such as labels, brochures and explanatory texts are available in the museum, this study specifically focuses on the translation of explanatory texts presenting the ethnographic identity and archeological findings of the city. For this purpose, twenty-three texts displayed in information boards have been selected and their translations have been analyzed according to translation quality assessment model of Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MMQ). As a result of a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the selected texts, the type, distribution and frequency of translation errors encountered in the selected corpus have been described according to eight dimensions of the metric. Based on this text-based and linguistically-oriented methodology, the functionality of the translated museum texts has been evaluated. It is concluded that this study will provide a theoretical framework and methodological guide to improve the quality assessment competences of lectures and students at the departments of translation studies as well as professional translators and researchers working in the area of museum translation.

Exploring Cross-Cultural Legal Terminology: A Corpus-Based Study of English Translation in Saudi Laws

Legal translation is deemed an arduous task, drawing on various lexical and structural choices (Chroma, 2004). Failure to adopt suitable translation strategies and procedures to overcome the challenges of translating legal terminology would undeniably affect the target readers’ ability to understand their translations. Therefore, this mixed-methods corpus-based study examined the English translation of 44 Arabic culture-specific legal terms (CSLTs) used in six Saudi laws (SLs) and focused on identifying the translation strategies and procedures. The CSLTs included in this study were categorized into religious terms, names of institutions, titles of laws, and miscellaneous terms. To analyze the CSLTs’ translation, a parallel corpus including the six SLs and their translations was created using Phrase TMS. To identify the strategies and procedures, Venuti’s (1995) and Mailhac’s (1996) models were utilized. The results revealed that both of Venuti’s strategies were followed, and domestication was adopted more than foreignization. In addition, seven of Mailhac’s procedures were applied, where the procedure most employed is definition, while compensation is the least used.

Translation Studies from a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Reinventing Subjectivity—A Case Study of English Translation of A Dream of Red Mansions

Translation Studies from a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Reinventing Subjectivity—A Case Study of English Translation of A Dream of Red Mansions

College English Translation Teaching with the Goal of Improving English Application Ability

College English Translation Teaching with the Goal of Improving English Application Ability

Alfred Baeumler: Aesthetics

Following one of our research topics we present here the first English translation of the text ‘Aesthetics’, written by the philosopher Alfred Baeumler. Here we have a deep, innovative, insightful and rigorous work.

Voices and/of Places

After Indonesia’s independence was officially recognised by the Netherlands in 1949, several former members of the colonial élite repatriated. Many among the Indies-born repatriatees’ generation used writing to come to terms with their own controversial, multifaceted identity. While they belonged to the colonial élite, they can be studied as writers geographically and temporally displaced as their colonial land of birth no longer exists. Their desire for belonging is arguably exemplified in the way their novels’ protagonists’ linguistic identity is depicted. While these authors write in Dutch, their characters are embedded in local cultures, languages, traditions, questioning fixed labels and dichotomies. Taking as example Helga Ruebsamen’s 1997 novel Het lied en de waarheid [The song and the truth], this article explores how linguistic identity is represented in Dutch literature of repatriation and how this is tackled in translation into English. This novel is chosen not only because it allows to explore plurality in literature and translation in the selected context, but also because it takes the issues of linguistic plurality in literature and translation a step further: the five-year-old Dutch protagonist leaves the tropical (colonial) environment with its enchanting nature behind and arrives with her family in the Netherlands in 1939 as the daughter of a Jewish doctor, unveiling a third identity layer beyond the Dutch-East Indian dichotomy. After positioning this novel within Dutch literature of repatriation by means of a close reading analysis, this article discusses why and how it can be studied as a heterolingual, diasporic (in this specific case, neither colonial, nor postcolonial) text. The translation strategies used to tackle representations of cultural and linguistic hybridity into English are then analysed by means of a comparative textual analysis. Looking for recurring trends, the results are finally briefly related to the findings of a doctoral project about the English and Italian translations of Dutch-East Indian novels by Hella S. Haasse, which suggest that shared tendencies to generalisation may risk distorting images of linguistic hybridity.

Translation Methods for Food Culture-specific Expressions in David Hawkes’ English Translation of the Chu ci

The Chu ci, a significant legacy of ancient Chinese culture, showcases a diverse range of culinary vocabulary that mirrors the lifestyle of the ancient Chu people and reflects the deep-rooted Jingchu culture of China. This paper focuses on analyzing the translation methods of food-related vocabulary in the Chu ci, with a specific focus on the pieces known as the “Da zhao” (“The Great Summons”）and “Zhao hun” (“Summons of the Soul”) in the canon, which serve as the primary research object in this study. The present study primarily investigates the influential translation of the Chu ci by the renowned sinologist David Hawkes, namely, The Songs of the South (1985). It aims to explores the methods employed by Hawkes in translating the food culture-specific expressions in the Chu ci. The research findings were that as a distinguished sinologist, Hawkes took into consideration the cultural background and cognitive habits of the target readers in translating. He utilized various translation methods such as interpretation, adaptation and communicative translation to effectively interpret the original text. Besides, the paper evaluates the shortcomings present in Hawkes’ translation, including mistranslations and omissions. The goals of this study is to offer some insights and guidance for future translators, promote cross-cultural dissemination and understanding of Chinese culinary culture, and enhance global recognition and appreciation of the unique charm of Chinese civilization.

KasNAT: Non-autoregressive machine translation for Kashmiri to English using knowledge distillation

Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (NAT) represents a groundbreaking advancement in Machine Translation, enabling the simultaneous prediction of output tokens and significantly boosting translation speeds compared to traditional auto-regressive (AR) models. Recent NAT models have adeptly balanced translation quality and speed, surpassing their AR counterparts. The widely employed Knowledge Distillation (KD) technique in NAT involves generating training data from pre-trained AR models, enhancing NAT model performance. While KD has consistently proven its empirical effectiveness and substantial accuracy gains in NAT models, its potential within Indic languages has yet to be explored. This study pioneers the evaluation of NAT model performance for Indic languages, focusing mainly on Kashmiri to English translation. Our exploration encompasses varying encoder and decoder layers and fine-tuning hyper-parameters, shedding light on the vital role KD plays in facilitating NAT models to capture variations in output data effectively. Our NAT models, enhanced with KD, exhibit sacreBLEU scores ranging from 16.20 to 22.20. The Insertion Transformer reaches a SacreBLEU of 22.93, approaching AR model performance.

Exploring normal vs. service translators’ orientation in rendering realia in The Holy Qur’an

Abstract Realia has always been thought of as a great challenge for translators. The native language and cultural background of a translator can be a factor potentially affecting the selection of equivalents and translation procedures. This paper aims to explore whether being a normal or a service translator would have any effect on adopting source- or target-oriented translation procedures. ‘Service translators’ are those who translate into a foreign language, while ‘normal translators’ are those who translate into their mother language. In other words, normal translators should be target-language native translators. The corpus includes the realia extracted from The Holy Qur’an and its four English translations by two service translators (Abdel-Haleem 2005 and Starkovsky 2005) and two normal translators (Arberry 1955 and Abu Nasr 1985). The data were analyzed on the basis of Liang’s (2016) model. Findings revealed that the normal translators showed a slightly greater tendency (1%) towards source-oriented procedures than the service translators. On the other hand, target-oriented procedures adopted by the service translators exceeded those of the normal translators by 0.50%.

The neural network algorithm-based quality assessment method for university English translation

ABSTRACT These results highlight the transformative potential of neural network algorithms in providing consistency and transparency while reducing the inherent subjectivity in human evaluations, revolutionizing translation quality assessment in academia. The findings have significant implications for academia, as reliable translation quality evaluations are crucial for fostering cross-cultural knowledge exchange. However, challenges such as domain-specific adaptation require further investigation to improve and maximize the effectiveness of this novel approach, ultimately enhancing the accessibility of academic content and promoting global academic discourse. The proposed method involves using neural network algorithms for assessing college-level English translation quality, starting with data collection and preparation, developing a neural network model, and evaluating its performance using human assessment as a benchmark. The study employed both human evaluators and a neural network model to assess the quality of translated academic papers, revealing a strong correlation (0.84) between human and model assessments. These findings suggest the model’s potential to enhance translation quality in academic settings, though additional research is needed to address certain limitations. The results show that the Neural Network-Based Model achieved higher scores in accuracy, precision, F-measure, and recall compared to Traditional Manual Evaluation and Partial Automated Model, indicating its superior performance in evaluating translation quality.

Study on English Localization Translation of Domestic Games—Taking the Opera “The Divine Damsel of Devastation” in Genshin Impact as an Example

In recent years, the demand for game enterprises to explore overseas markets has been growing. Not only have more high-quality foreign games been imported into China, but Chinese games have also become an important part of Chinese culture “going out” and “telling good Chinese stories”. This paper takes the global high popularity game Genshin Impact as an example, and combines the Skopos theory to update the research on game localization from the perspective of Chinese-English translation, and analyzes the application of translation and creation in the process of localization translation of drama.