Language Pairs Research Articles

CURRENT RESEARCHES ON THE ISSUE OF ASSESSMENT IN TRANSLATION DIDACTICS

This paper deals with studying the current research addressing the issues of assessment in translation didactics. The critical analysis of relevant scientific resources is aimed at finding out important theoretical achievements, empirical contributions and best practices in the sphere of organization and realization of the assessment aspects in translation teaching for grounding theorizing of the assessment system in teaching translation in the realm of education. In particular, the paper focuses on approaches, aims, functions, objects, kinds, methods and instruments, their peculiarities and requirements to them in terms of kind of translation, language pair, subject domain, higher education grade level. The outlined issues include incorporating industry assessment practices into education and academic training; forms and peculiarities of feedback and evaluation functions; methods (holistic, analytical, combined) of measuring and assessing translation quality, level of competence in translation and its components, learning objectives, efficiency of the translation process; methods of translation process monitoring; assessment criteria; finding, analysis and classification of translator's errors and mistakes; classification of kinds of assessment and ways of their realization; peculiarities of formative and summative assessment in translation teaching; involving students in assessment procedure; self-assessment and peer assessment and ways of their efficiency providing; testing in translation teaching.

Experts, Errors, and Context: A Large-Scale Study of Human Evaluation for Machine Translation

AbstractHuman evaluation of modern high-quality machine translation systems is a difficult problem, and there is increasing evidence that inadequate evaluation procedures can lead to erroneous conclusions. While there has been considerable research on human evaluation, the field still lacks a commonly accepted standard procedure. As a step toward this goal, we propose an evaluation methodology grounded in explicit error analysis, based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework. We carry out the largest MQM research study to date, scoring the outputs of top systems from the WMT 2020 shared task in two language pairs using annotations provided by professional translators with access to full document context. We analyze the resulting data extensively, finding among other results a substantially different ranking of evaluated systems from the one established by the WMT crowd workers, exhibiting a clear preference for human over machine output. Surprisingly, we also find that automatic metrics based on pre-trained embeddings can outperform human crowd workers. We make our corpus publicly available for further research.

Bir Kültür Değişmezi Olarak İstiklâl Marşı: Çeviri Amaçlı Çözümleme ve Çeviri Sorunları (Türkçe-Rusça Dil Çifti)

Günümüz çok kutuplu ve çok kültürlü dünyada bir toplum kendini anlatmak ve anlaşılmak ya da “öteki” toplumları anlamak ve kültürel diplomasi çerçevesinde uzun süreli stratejiyi geliştirmek istiyorsa gerek kendi kültür değişmezlerini doğru bir şekilde tanıtmak gerekse diğer toplumların kültür değişmezlerini çözümlemek zorundadır. Bu bağlamda kültür değişmezi olarak tanımlanabilen metinlerin tespiti ve çevirisi günümüzde güncel bir sorun olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu çalışmada 12 Mart 2021 tarihinde kabulünün 100. yüzyılı kutlanan Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin İstiklâl Marşı kültür değişmezi kavramı açısından ele alınmıştır. Araştırma sırasında İstiklâl Marşı’nın “başlıca fikirlerin aktarımı” şeklinde Rusça çevirisinin www.wikipedia.org sayfasında yer aldığı tespit edilmiştir. Bu çeviri metni çeviri amaçlı metin çözümlemesi çerçevesinde incelenmiş ve hedef metnin kaynak metindeki imgeleri ve bakış açısını yansıtmadığı tespit edilmiştir. Çalışmanın devamında İstiklâl Marşı’nın Rusça çevirisi tarafımızca yapılmış ve öne sürülen çeviri seçenekleri çözümlenmiştir. İstiklâl Marşı gibi kültür değişmezi niteliği taşıyan metinlerin Rusça başta olmak üzere farklı dillere çevrilmesinin kültürel diplomasi kapsamında gündeme getirilmesi gerektiği vurgulanmıştır.

Human-Computer Interaction in Translation Activity: Fluency of Machine Translation

Digitalization is one of the key distinctive features of modern environment and social life. Nowadays more and more functions are transferred to the artificial mind. How effective is the replacement of human activity with computer activity? In the given article, this problem is solved by an example of integration of digital technologies into translation activities. It this paper, emphasis is placed on the quality of machine translation (MT) output of legal texts in the language pair English - Slovak. It studies a Criminal Code formulated in the Slovak language which was translated by a human translator into English and consequently via machine translation system Google Translate (GT) back into Slovak. The back-translation - translation of a translated text back into its original language - as a quality assessment tool to detect discrepancies, mistranslations and inevitable differences between the source text and the target text was used. The quality of MT output was evaluated according to Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) standards with the focus on the dimension of Fluency. The multiple comparisons were applied to determine which issues (errors) in Fluency dimension differ from the others. A statistically significant difference is noticed between Agreement and other issues, as well as between Ambiguity and other issues. The errors in Agreement are related to the differences between the languages: English is considered mostly an analytic language, Slovak represents a synthetic language. The issues in the Ambiguity dimension correlate with the type of the text being examined, since legal texts are characterized by relatively complicated wording and numerous terms; moreover, accuracy and unambiguity need to be preserved. Generally, the MT output is able to provide users with basic information about the text. On the other hand, most of the segments need revision and/or correction; in such cases, human intervention and post-editing is necessary.

CULTURALLY SPECIFIC SENSE OF SIMILE IN TRANSLATION (A CASE STUDY OF THE FLORA NAMES LEAF, TREE IN UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH)

Culturally specifi c images and symbols are ethnic semantics carriers. They show historical, national and cultural experience of the nation. The translation studies analysis of similes with a fl ora name, verbalised in the Ukrainian-English language pair, enables tracing the peculiarities of culturally specifi c images and concepts. The article investigates, analyses and gives detailed characteristic of the notion of the culturally specifi c sense as an element of the actual sense of simile, peculiarities of universal and nationally specifi c attributes being the result of the national conceptualisation of a corresponding fl ora object (leaf, tree) in the consciousness of Ukrainian and English speakers. Translation studies analysis is applied aiming at revealing the ways of rendering the culturally specifi c sense in similes with a fl ora name (leaf, tree). Ways of translating simile with the utmost load of cultural information rendering are discussed. Key words: simile, fl ora name, translation, culturally specifi c sense, ways of translation

When semantics and phonology collide: Gender assignment in mixed Tsova-Tush–Georgian nominal constructions

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This paper investigates the gender assignment strategies employed when genderless Georgian nouns are inserted into gendered Tsova-Tush utterances. We explore the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors motivating the strategies, and compare how these code-switches behave in relation to loans. Design/methodology/approach: Taking a broadly usage-based approach, we collected three types of data: (a) naturalistic corpus data; (b) semi-naturalistic production data from a forced-switch director–matcher (DM) task; and (c) a three-response forced-choice acceptability judgement task (AJT). Data and analysis: The responses from the DM task ( n = 12) and AJT acceptability ( n = 12) were analysed using descriptive (Chi-square) and inferential (log-linear) statistics. The corpus data are described qualitatively. Findings/conclusions: Both the gender of the Tsova-Tush translation equivalent (TE) and the Georgian phonology of the code-switched noun were significantly related to the response, with the TE being the stronger determinant of the two. Only marginal evidence for a default strategy was found. Production responses were found to be more consistent than comprehension responses, with more frequent lexemes displaying higher inter-participant consistency in production. Originality: Tsova-Tush, an endangered Nakh–Daghestanian language with five genders marked by prefixes, offers much-needed diversification within the code-switching literature concerning grammatical gender. This complexity also raises new questions regarding the notion of default in mixed nominal constructions. Significance/implications: Our findings support the prediction that first language speakers of a gendered language prefer a TE strategy, but contradict a relationship between default strategy and language dominance. Phonological criteria display a stronger role in gender assignment than previously found. Frequency and entrenchment of gender–noun pairings partially explain inter-speaker and inter-stimulus variation and consistency, providing a plausible pathway from code-switches to borrowings. Limitations: An unavoidable limitation is the sample size, reflecting the small speaker population. We strongly advocate for similar research in other language pairs in the Caucasus where gender systems feature prominently.

The Role of Prosody and Morphology in the Mapping of Information Structure onto Syntax

The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference found in these two pairs of languages follows from a division of labor across language modules, such that two extreme values of the continuum of possible interactions across modules are available as well as combinations of morphological and intonational markers. At one extreme, in languages such as Inuktitut and Quechua, a rich set of morphemes with scope over constituents convey sentence-level and discourse-level distinctions, making the alignment of intonational patterns and information structure apparently redundant. At the other extreme, as in English and to some extent Spanish, a series of consistent alignments of PF and syntactic structure are required to distinguish sentence types and to determine the information value of a constituent. This results in a complementary distribution of morphology and intonation in these languages. In contact situations, overlap between patterns of module interaction are attested. Evidence from Quechua–Spanish and Inuktitut–English bilinguals supports a bidirectionality of crosslinguistic influence; intonational patterns emerge in non-intonational languages to distinguish sentence types, whereas morphemes or discourse particles emerge in intonational languages to mark discourse-level features.

Die Größe ‚Gewicht‘ im deutsch-italienischen Sprachvergleich

The topic of this article is ‘weight’ in the German-Italian language comparison. Which linguistic means are used to refer to weight in German (Gewicht) and what are the Italian equivalents? The material which has been collected is based on monolingual German and Italian dictionaries, reference works and text corpora as well as on bilingual German-Italian dictionaries and text excerpts.
 The classification of the so-called weight designations including derivatives, composites and word combinations is carried out from an etymological and lexical perspective. In addition to the dictionary entries, German-Italian translation examples show further equivalents of terms and expressions with regards to ‘weight’ in this language pair.

Der Ausdruck von Aktionen im Deutschen und Italienischen

The article considers contrastive linguistics as a discipline that interacts closely with its intralinguistic and applied neighbouring disciplines. Within this framework, the online ontology IMAGACT presents an instrument that allows to contrast how languages lexicalize concrete actions (movements, modification of objects, setting relations among objects, etc.) in their verbs.
 German and Italian, the language pair considered here, differ typologically in their lexicalization strategies, which leads to difficulties in L2 acquisition, translation and lexicography. The article shows how the corpus-based IMAGACT database, which presents a set of 1010 actions in short films and links them to the appropriate verbs in 15 languages, provides help in these fields, and how it can at the same time empirically support contrastive-typological findings

Deutsch im Vergleich. Sprachliche Strukturen im Kontrast zum Italienischen

This thematic issue of Linguistik online is dedicated to Contrastive linguistics for the language pair Italian-German. The contributions collected here deal with Italian-German language comparison from different points of view. The common feature of all of them is a corpus-oriented approach. Using authentic attestations from different linguistic sources, the linguistic structures of both languages are analysed and compared with each other. The granular and fine-grained comparison enabled the authors to work out interesting results not only in the fields of morphology and syntax, but also for pragmatics, and text and discourse linguistics for both languages, which can be profitably used in foreign language didactics, theoretical linguistics and translation studies.

Soziogeographische Variation im Deutschen und ihre Übersetzung ins Italienische

The translation of multilingual texts, in which diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic varieties contribute to the characterization of the figures and their milieus, poses the problem of the sociolinguistic adequacy of the translation. It is well known that the greatest challenge lies in the varieties caused by the spatial variation of the language, since it is practically impossible to establish perfect equivalence between dialects. However, the reproduction of diamesic varieties, in particular the written reproduction of the spoken language, can cause great difficulties for translators. The article presents the TRADIVARIO project, the aim of which is to investigate strategies and tendencies in the translation of multilingual literary texts for the German-Italian language pair that are characterized by a pronounced sociolinguistic stratification or representative of the variety structure of the spoken language of the present. In addition, the concrete goal of the project is the creation of a parallel corpus as well as the development of a digital platform, which makes the results of the investigation researchable and which can serve as a tool both for translators and learners and as an empirical basis for contrastive linguistic research.

Translating and Post-Editing in the Chinese-Portuguese Language Pair

Translating and Post-Editing in the Chinese-Portuguese Language Pair

Question-answer pairs in Russian Sign Language: a corpus study

Question-answer pairs in Russian Sign Language: a corpus study

Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

Towards Sustainable Use of Machine Translation: Usability and Perceived Quality from the End-User Perspective

Artificial intelligence-grounded machine translation has fundamentally changed public awareness and attitudes towards multilingual communication. In some language pairs, the accuracy, quality and efficiency of machine-translated texts of certain types can be quite high. Hence, the end-user acceptability and reliance on machine-translated content could be justified. However, machine translation in small and/or low-resource languages might yield significantly lower quality, which in turn may lead to potentially negative consequences and risks if machine translation is used in high-risk contexts without awareness of the drawbacks, critical assessment and modifications to the raw output. The current study, which is part of a more extensive project focusing on the societal impact of machine translation, is aimed at revealing the attitudes towards usability and quality as perceived from the end-user perspective. The research questions addressed revolve around the machine translation types used, purposes of using machine translation, perceived quality of the generated output, and actions taken to improve the quality by users with various backgrounds. The research findings rely on a survey of the population (N = 402) conducted in 2021 in Lithuania. The study reveals the frequent use of machine translation for a diversity of purposes. The most common uses include work, research and studies, and household environments. A higher level of education correlates with user dissatisfaction with the generated quality and actions taken to improve it. The findings also reveal that age correlates with the use of machine translation. Sustainable measures to reduce machine translation related risks have to be established based on the perceptions of different social groups in different societies and cultures.

THE SYSTEM OF EXERCISES FOR TEACHING ORAL CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING

The aim of our study was to create a system of exercises for teaching interpretation in the language pair "German-Ukrainian", due to the emergence of new standards for the quality of professional training of interpreters. In our article we used theoretical and empirical research methods: critical analysis of scientific literature on translation studies, methods of professional training of translators; educational documents and textbooks in higher education institutions; monitoring the organization of interpretation training in higher education institutions; observation of the organization of interpretation training in the Free Economic Zone; survey of translation teachers in order to study the state of professional training of applicants for higher education; questionnaires, self-assessment of future translators in order to identify the probable level of their professional competence. At the initial stage of the study, a survey of both higher education and translation teachers was conducted in order to identify priority areas of professional interpretation of an interpreter, to select relevant material and develop a system of exercises to develop skills and skills of interpretation within the discipline "Fundamentals of Interpreting", which is taught in the 3rd year (180 hours, 6 credits). The subject component of the content of interpretation training is limited on the basis of the results of the questionnaire in the following areas: social, political, as well as the field of culture and education. According to the stages of interpretation training, a system of exercises consisting of three subsystems has been developed. These include exercises for: 1) the formation of special skills of interpretation; 2) automation of skills and formation of special and strategic skills; 3) development of special and strategic skills. The material for the development of these exercises was authentic German-language online sources in the field of culture and education, as well as social and political spheres of human activity (official websites of Deutsche Welle, the European Commission, the website of the Federal Chancellor and the President of Germany; private podcast Annik Rubens Slow German mit Annik Rubens, printed publications in online format: Bild, Zeit, Spiegel, die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine, as well as online terminological dictionaries. The total amount of practical tasks for translation and exercises for the formation and automation of special skills of interpretation and development of strategic skills is 200 units, which are offered as a basis for the conclusion of methodological development for teaching interpretation in the 3rd year. Key words: consecutive interpreting, professional competence of an interpreter, system of exercises, stages of training, groups of exercises.

Language distance modulates cognitive control in bilinguals

Linguistic processes in the bilingual brain are partially shared across languages, and the degree of neural overlap between the languages is influenced by several factors, including the age of acquisition, relative language proficiency, and immersion. There is limited evidence on the role of linguistic distance on the performance of the language control as well as domain-general cognitive control systems. The present study aims at exploring whether being bilingual in close and distant language pairs (CLP and DLP) influences language control and domain-general cognitive processes. We recruited two groups of DLP (Persian–English) and CLP (French–English) bilinguals. Subjects performed language nonswitching and switching picture-naming tasks and a nonlinguistic switching task while EEG data were recorded. Behaviorally, CLP bilinguals showed a lower cognitive cost than DLP bilinguals, reflected in faster reaction times both in language switching (compared to nonswitching) and nonlinguistic switching. ERPs showed differential involvement of cognitive control regions between the CLP and DLP groups during linguistic switching vs. nonswitching at 450 to 515 ms poststimulus presentation. Moreover, there was a difference between CLP and DLP groups from 40 to 150 ms in the nonlinguistic task. Our electrophysiological results confirm a stronger involvement of language control and domain-general cognitive control regions in CLP bilinguals.

Word reordering on multiple pivots for the Japanese and Indonesian language pair

Word reordering on multiple pivots for the Japanese and Indonesian language pair

Cross-script phonological activation in Chinese-English bilinguals: The effect of SOA from masked priming.

The issue of bilingual phonological access remains unclear for bilinguals with cross-script language systems, which is especially true when the time course of phonological activation is involved. To investigate the time course of cross-script phonological activation, the present study asked Chinese-English bilinguals to complete a word naming task that was conducted in a forward-masked phonological priming paradigm in three stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. By comparing the interlingual and intralingual phonological priming effects in a within-subjects design, we found that (a) target naming in Chinese and English was facilitated by a phonologically similar English or Chinese prime in the three SOA conditions (43 ms, 75 ms, and 150 ms) and the facilitation effect of the prime reached the peak when the pronunciation of the prime-target pair most resembled each other and (b) manipulation of the SOAs affected both the naming latencies of target words and the sizes of the phonological priming effect. In particular, naming latencies in each prime-target type displayed an increasing tendency as the SOA prolonged. Moreover, despite the varied sizes of the priming effect in the three SOA conditions, we found a consistent pattern that the priming effects in two interlingual conditions resembled their respective intralingual conditions along the time course. Taken together, these findings provide strong support for an integrated phonological representation of bilinguals and further extend the language nonselective access hypothesis to language pairs with very different orthographic systems. Implications for the manipulation of the SOAs in the masked priming paradigm are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Methodological Framework for the Development of an English-Lithuanian Cybersecurity Termbase

The aim of the paper is to present a methodological framework for the development of an English-Lithuanian bilingual termbase in the cybersecurity domain, which can be applied as a model for other language pairs and other specialised domains. It is argued that the presented methodological approach can ensure creation of high-quality bilingual termbases even with limited available resources. The paper touches upon the methods and problems of dataset (corpora) compilation, terminology annotation, automatic bilingual term extraction (BiTE) and alignment, knowledge-rich context extraction, and linguistic linked open data (LLOD) technologies. The paper presents theoretical considerations as well as the arguments on the effectiveness of the described methods. The theoretical analysis and a pilot study allow arguing that: 1) a combination of parallel and comparable corpora enable to considerably expand the amount and variety of data sources that can be used for terminology extraction; this methodology is especially important for less-resourced languages which often lack parallel data; 2) deep learning systems trained by using manually annotated data (gold standard corpora) allow effective automatization of extraction of terminological data and metadata, which enables to regularly update termbases with minimised manual input; 3) LLOD technologies enable to integrate the terminological data into the global linguistic data ecosystem and make it reusable, searchable and discoverable across the Web.