Translation Corpus Research Articles

Повесть А.П. Чехова «Степь» в англоязычных переводах

Chekhov’s works have been actively translated into English for 130 years; however, these translations have scarcely been addressed systematically and remain understudied. This is especially relevant in case of his stories and novellas. This article focuses on the translations of Chekhov’s The Steppe - a novella that marked the writer’s transition from early stories to mature prose. The 20th and 21st centuries have seen five English translations of The Steppe, which mark five main stages of its reception. The novella was first introduced to the English-speaking reader by E.L. Kaye in 1916. Though highly criticized for literalism and unsuccessful methods of translating Russian realia, Kaye’s translation played an important role in the development of the creative dialogue between Chekhov and K. Mansfield, which clearly reflected the influence of Chekhov’s prose on the formation of modern English literature. The canonical translations by C. Garnett determined Chekhov’s reception in England and the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s. The translator introduced Chekhov to the English-speaking reader as an artist of Russian life, a master in depicting various types of characters, and as a thorough researcher of a person’s inner world. This vision determined a specific perspective in the 1919 translation of The Steppe, where Father Christopher is foregrounded as a collective image of the Russian clergy. In the new stage of perception in the 1970s-1980s, Chekhov, a foreign writer, was organically accepted by the English-speaking culture as “its own”. This stage brought about the translation of The Steppe by R. Hingley, who authored two monographs about Chekhov and was the editor of The Oxford Chekhov (1964-1980). Hingley considered Chekhov’s mature prose as the most valuable part of the writer’s literary legacy. For the first time, The Oxford Chekhov adequately describes The Steppe as Chekhov’s landmark work. The strategy of cultural appropriation in Hingley’s translation implied modernization of Chekhov’s language. The translations by R. Wilkes (2001) and R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (2004) represent the latest stage in the English-language reception of The Steppe. They are associated with the general trend towards updating the corpus of translations of Russian classics into English in the 2000s. In their translation, Pevear and Volokhonsky use the strategy of estrangement, opposed to “smooth” translation, typical for English culture. The translators’ interest in the novella resulted from Chekhov’s genre innovation. All the translations of The Steppe are independent representations of the original, which demonstrate the productive reception of the novella in the English-language culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their comparative analysis has revealed that the biggest challenge in translation is the image of the steppe, which is associated with the main philosophical meanings of the work. This is evidenced by the significant transformations of the motifs of space and distance, which form the spatial dominant of the image in the original. In most translations, the semantically integral motifs of the original break into a number of components with weaker meanings. The research has shown that these transformations come from objective cultural and linguistic differences that limit the possibilities of a full-fledged translation, as well as from individual strategies of translators, who differently assess the role and meaning of these verbal motifs in the original text. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Professionalisation of translator training in the people's republic of China

This paper deals with the problem of professionalisation of translators. It looks at the system of professionalisation that has developed in Chinese universities that train translators. The essence of the concept of 'professionalisation' is specified in the context of this study. The trend of recent years towards an increasing number of higher education institutions authorised to offer the Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) programme has been noted. The focus is on marketisation is an important factor in MTI training. The most important teaching methods for effective professionalisation are presented: specialisation in a particular field, case-study, the comparative analysis method, method of combining theory and practice, process-oriented approach, the product-oriented approach, the computer assisted translation method, the translation workshop method, the translation corpus method, the consciously practical method. The main advantages of the translator training system are identified: the continuity of the professionalisation process – from the beginning of university studies to further training during the career, the practical orientation of the majority of the courses, the wide range of practical training opportunities in different organisations and institutions, the specialisation in specific fields (technology, medicine, economics, etc.), the use of effective teaching methods to develop practical skills in interpretation and translation. The important role of on-campus learning centres and off-campus internship bases set up by colleges and universities to facilitate internships for students is noted.

The Typology of Motion Expressions in English, Japanese, and Persian: Reconsidering the Cline versus Typology Debate Based on Heading

Talmy’s cognitive-semantic typology divides languages based on how path and manner of motion are generally encoded, but recently some studies have suggested that the original typology needs re-examining either by adding a new type (e.g., Slobin, 2004) or using a cline rather than a two or three-language division (e.g., Ibarretxe-Antou?ano, 2009). Furthermore, Matsumoto (2003) has suggested that Talmy’s original typology should be founded on the heading of a language, rather than the original terms of satellite and verb. This study observes Persian motion events through this concept to help determine if an intermediate language can neatly fit into a single category when analyzed based on heading, or whether a new cline based on heading should be considered. We compared data from a translation corpus of the short story “A Christmas Carol” using a representative verb-framed and satellite-framed language (i.e., Japanese and English), and found that Persian shares some path encoding tendencies with both English and Japanese, but also has significant differences, which suggest it could perhaps be better described as fitting on a cline of path-salience, rather than simply placed in either category.

Corpus-based Translation Study of Cultural Heritage International Publicity--A Case Study of Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art

With the deepening development of economic globalization, countries all over the world pay more and more attention to the translation of cultural heritage publicity. In foreign communication, publicity translation plays an important role, and Chinese-English translation is also an indispensable means. Therefore, this paper studies takes Huashan Rock Art as the research object, and adopts methods of literature analysis and corpus-based research to realize the publicity translation of cultural heritage application texts. Based on the comparative analysis of Chinese-English translation, it is suggested to strengthen government management, give play to the leading role of the government, attach importance to the training of high-level translation talents, improve the quality of translation, and promote the development of translation research for cultural publicity. There is outstanding significance and universal value of Huashan Rock Art. To protect Huashan Rock Art is to preserve the rich diversity of world cultures and protect our spiritual home. Applying for world cultural heritage is an important way for Huashan Rock Art from ornamental value to research value and then to wealth value enhancement. The study on the translation of Huashan Rock Paintings is of strategic importance to the cultural development of Guangxi. This study provides some reference for the foreign publicity translation of other cultural landscape heritages, therefore it is beneficial to promote the development of corpus translation. Through the translation of Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art application text, it provides a certain direction for the publicity translation of other cultural landscape heritage and it can promote the study of translation commonness. The publicity translation of Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art application text will bring abundant information to the world people and they may know about Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art, Luoyue culture and Chinese culture. Meanwhile, it can better promote the development of cultural tourism industry of Guangxi, even that of China. In addition, the communication and cooperation between China and other countries in the world will be promoted through foreign cultural exchanges, and it is a best approach to promote the development of friendly relations between China and foreign countries.

Traduire l’Ekphrasis. Le cas des Fleurs du mal de Baudelaire en Iran

Cultural exchanges between Iran and France started over three centuries ago. In spite of the strong relationship between the two countries, some books such as Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) went unnoticed in Iranian society. In addition to the literary value of the book, we propose to study ekphrasis in Baudelaire’s poems and its translation into Persian. Its meaning being that of a general description an artwork (imaginary or real), the term ekphrasis belongs to an interdisciplinary field of literature and art where the textual challenges we face may vary from one to another. To narrow down our study, we will focus on four chosen poems that have a minimum of two published translations in Persian, thus allowing the opportunity for a comparative study. These chosen poems, “La Beauté”, “L’Invitation au voyage”, “Les Plaintes d’un Icare” and “Femmes damnées” (“Delphine et Hippolyte”) as well as our corpus translation in Persian, are being studied and analysed through Descriptive Translation Studies. The analysis focuses on the ekphrastic aspect of these poems, their translations into Persian through syntactic and semantic levels and the influence of culture and society on the translation.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF A METHOD FOR SYTHESIZING SENTENCES IN THE KAZAKH LANGUAGE BASED ON MACHINE LEARNING

Today, sentence synthesis is used in various fields. These are voice assistants, IVR systems, smart homes, chatbots and much more. Some time ago, machine learning appeared in the field of speech synthesis, as in many other fields. Machine learning is a broad set of artificial intelligence that studies methods for creating algorithms capable of learning. It turned out that a number of components of the entire system can be replaced by neural networks, which allows not only to approach the existing algorithms with quality, but even significantly surpass them. The article provides an overview of sentence synthesis technologies, solves the problem of sentence synthesis in the Kazakh language based on a chatbot system using the seq2seq method. A parallel corpus of questions and answers has been collected in the Kazakh language. The corpus of questions and answers in Kazakh was collected as a result of translation and cleaning of many corpora, such as Cornell movie, Ubantu and others, which are used to create many chatbots in English. A number of experiments were carried out and results were obtained using corpora based on the constructed model for the synthesis of sentences in the Kazakh language.

포스트에디팅 결과물의 정확성 오류 고찰 — AI 학습용 금융/증시 분야 한-영 번역 말뭉치를 대상으로 —

In sharp contrast to great attention to the quality of Machine Translation (MT) raw output, the quality of post-edited output has drawn relatively little attention in Korean translation studies, although some errors in MT output can remain even after post-editing. Against this backdrop, this study sets out to investigate accuracy errors in post-edited output, based on Korean-English parallel translation corpus for AI training released in June 2021 by the National Information Society Agency. For this purpose, 200 parallel sentences with accuracy errors were collected and classified by error type. According to the analysis results, mistranslation errors account for about two-thirds, with the rest in omissions, indicating that quite a number of omissions are still left in post-edited output. While lexical errors ranging from words to clauses are found most frequently in mistranslations, syntax errors represent a surprisingly large portion, with many errors in modifiers and subjects. This study draws attention to quality in MT post-editing, suggesting the need for further investigation into factors affecting the quality of post-edited output.

A syntactic complexity analysis of translational English across genres

Abstract This study compares the syntactic complexity between translational and non-translational English across four genres (i.e. fiction, news, general prose, and academic prose) and examines the connections between various forms and degrees of syntactic complexity measures and explicitation. Fourteen syntactic complexity indices were examined based on a one-million-word translational English corpus (COTE) and a one-million-word non-translational English corpus (i.e. FLOB), respectively. This study shows that syntactic explicitation in translations varies with the formality of discourse. The most significant complexity difference between translational vis-à-vis non-translational English is found in fiction, which is regarded as the major contributor to translational English syntactic complexity. No significant difference in syntactic complexity was observed between the two types of academic English texts. Translational English news and general prose stand between fiction and academic texts. Translational fiction and news are characterised by more phrasal complexity features such as coordinate and complex nominal phrases, and a key indicator of translational English general prose complexity is subordination. The findings of this study will help students of translation to make informed decisions on the arrangement of sentence structures when given texts of different genres.

Retraction Note to: Machine learning-based prediction of urban soil environment and corpus translation teaching

In recent years, due to the development of science and technology, the existence of objective factors such as people’s abuse of pesticides and unreasonable development, the soil has been seriously polluted, and its quality has also declined. People’s living environment and the agricultural products they need are also affected by it. Frequent problems have seriously affected the sustainable development of the ecological environment. This article takes the central and western parts of a province as the survey object, uses the methods of geological accumulation index and comprehensive pollution index to analyze the soil pollution status of the survey area, and uses the index soil fertility index to evaluate the soil fertility in the fresh food production area. The AERMOD model was used to calculate the dry sedimentation, wet sedimentation, and total sedimentation of organic waste gas. In addition, in the era of big data, with the emergence and development of artificial intelligence technology, translation technology has developed rapidly and has become the new favorite of the translation industry, which has had an important impact on the translation industry. It also puts forward new requirements for the construction of the corpus. Constructing the ecology of soil environment prediction from the perspective of ecological translation is helpful to construct the connotation of interconnection, mutual restriction and interaction among system components. This thesis is guided by the theoretical thoughts of ecological translation, and tries to explore the advancement of soil environment prediction by constructing an ecological view of translation. Through the application of project management concepts in daily teaching, it can help a student to better master the process and methods of translation and improve their translation ability.

Cohesion and Coherence in Technical Translation: The Case of Demonstrative Reference

This paper examines cohesion and coherence within the larger framework of an equivalence-relevant investigation based on a theoretically well-founded translation comparison and a highly refined translation corpus. Cohesion is analysed at the textual, more specifically at the sentential/supra-sentential, level taking due account of the underlying coherence operating at the text¬in-context level. The research investigates and exemplifies the English demonstrative determiner/pronoun ‘this’ as a cohesive device of reference and its German potential equivalents, and indicates trends in translation solutions. The results of this analysis will show that coherence – established by the interaction of intended sense and informed inference – is upheld in the German TT by cohesive means which, though occasionally quite different from their ST counterparts, contribute toward achieving “equivalence in difference” (Jakobson [1959]1992) at the overall text-in-context level.

Rufinus of Aquileia’s Historia ecclesiastica and Historia monachorum in Aegypto: A Dual Program of Monastic Historiography

Abstract The Historia monachorum in Aegypto is an anomaly among the vast corpus of translations produced by Rufinus of Aquileia, not least because it represents his only known experiment with the literary genre of monastic hagiography. This article explores the question of why he undertook this project at all and considers this issue of authorial intention in the broader context of Rufinus’ work as a church historian. In particular, I propose that he envisaged the Historia monachorum in Aegypto in part as a follow-up, or companion piece, to his recently completed Historia ecclesiastica and intended both writings to articulate cooperatively his vision of the monks of Egypt as prime movers in the Christianization of the fourth-century Roman Empire.

EXPRESSION OF INDUCEMENT IN KOREAN AND BULGARIAN

This article attempts to present some means of expressing inducement in Korean and Bulgarian and to suggest some features discovered in the translation corpus, composed of five original Korean novels and their translations in Bulgarian. Unlike imperative mood, which is a grammatically concretized notion of deontic modality, inducement is a complex unity formed by various elements such as morphological, syntactic and lexical elements. Therefore, it can be realized both directly and indirectly through the means, which express / do not express inducement in its own form. As for the direct way, Bulgarian has a synthetic and an analytic form. Korean has only a synthetic form, but it has six imperative endings, differing in terms of formality and politeness. Regarding the indirect way, some means like interrogative sentences with the verb in indicative mood and declarative sentences with modal verb are actively used in both languages, while others are used only in Bulgarian. For example, the use of a declarative sentence with a future tense verb in the indicative mood for the purpose of expressing inducement is clearly confirmed in Bulgarian, but in Korean this kind of sentence does not perform the same function at all. From the studied translation materials five main asymmetric features have been found – in the person of the addressee, the voice of the sentence, the way of expressing the inducement, the sentence structure and the way of strengthening the persistence.

Non-Equivalence in Translation: Russian-German Diachronic Corpus-Based Dictionaries of Non-Equivalent Units

This paper explores the essence of lexical units with no direct equivalents in other languages and introduces a bilingual dictionary of a new type. Such a dictionary is built upon a diachronic corpus of parallel translations with due consideration of the principles of present-day lexicography. The suggested diachronic German-Russian glossary of non-equivalent vocabulary – realia – presents the mega-, macro- and microstructure of a diachronic translation dictionary. The glossary is of a holistic character: it can provide information on the ways different realia were translated in various periods and thus reflect the creative role of translation plurality; it can also influence the formation of translating competence, acquisition of translating skills and skills of comparative analysis.

Parallel Corpora and ST Analysis: EU Regulations on Immigration in the Specialised Translation Classroom

Starting from the assumption that “if corpora are to play a role in the translation professions of tomorrow, it is important that they impact on the education of the students of today” (Bernardini & Castagnoli, 2008, p. 40), this study endeavours to show how translation corpora of parallel texts (in English and in Italian) can be used in a Specialised Translation Master’s degree classroom. The point of departure is to examine parallel or aligned texts (originals and their translations) taken from the various European Union websites available for citizens to read and consult. The corpora currently being gathered include a variety of text typologies ranging from legal documents (such as regulations or directives), to administrative documents (such as White and Green papers) or informative texts (such as leaflets, brochures or web texts) (Felici, 2010, p. 101), all of them dealing with migration and asylum issues. The various types of documents are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively in class according to the following three main methodologies: Corpus Linguistics (Stubbs, 1996), Genre Analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Classroom experiences in the past few years have shown that building ad hoc corpora (or do-it-yourself corpora as coined by Krüger, 2012, p. 514) for classroom consumption is a valuable and precious learning tool which enables students to hone their practical skills in the resource gathering process and consequently in the translation process itself.
 
 This study focuses on an EU regulation and shows how a lesson in class can be conducted with students at Cagliari University, Italy. The aim is to get students to work on the quantitative aspects along with the more qualitative linguistic elements of the ST (Source Text) in order to obtain greater awareness and understanding of professional translator strategies used by the professionals in the translation agencies of European Union institutions. From an educational and academic point of view, the linguistic and contrastive analysis of certain features of the ST along with the investigation of specialised terminology associated with contexts of migration and asylum and their equivalents in the TT (Target Text), have so far provided the Master’s students at Cagliari University with useful insights and sound knowledge of the linguistic characteristics of legal and institutional discourse in both English and Italian.

Can a corpus-driven lexical analysis of human and machine translation unveil discourse features that set them apart?

Abstract There is still much to learn about the ways in which human and machine translation differ with regard to the contexts that regulate the production and interpretation of discourse. The present study explores whether a corpus-driven lexical analysis of human and machine translation can unveil discourse features that set the two apart. A balanced corpus of source texts aligned with authentic, professional translations and neural machine translations was compiled for the study. Lexical discrepancies in the two translation corpora were then extracted via a corpus-driven keyword analysis, and examined qualitatively through parallel concordances of source texts aligned with human and machine translation. The study shows that keyword analysis not only reiterates known problems of discourse in machine translation such as lexical inconsistency and pronoun resolution, but can also provide valuable insights regarding contextual aspects of translated discourse deserving further research.

TriECCC: Trilingual Corpus of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for Speech Recognition and Translation Studies

This paper presents an extended work on the trilingual spoken language translation corpus of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), namely TriECCC. TriECCC is a simultaneously spoken language translation corpus with parallel resources of speech and text in three languages: Khmer, English, and French. This corpus has approximately [Formula: see text] thousand utterances, approximately [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] h in length of speech, and [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] million words in text, in Khmer, English, and French, respectively. We first report the baseline results of machine translation (MT), and speech translation (ST) systems, which show reasonable performance. We then investigate the use of the ROVER method to combine multiple MT outputs and fine-tune the pre-trained English–French MT models to enhance the Khmer MT systems. Experimental results show that the ROVER is effective for combining English-to-Khmer and French-to-Khmer systems. Fine-tuning from both single and multiple parents shows the effective improvement on the BLEU scores for Khmer-to-English/French and English/French-to-Khmer MT systems.

번역가 문체의 코퍼스 주도적 연구 - ‘as if’ 비유 번역을 중심으로 -

This paper looks into the translator’s style by examining two translators’ translation patterns found in their Korean translations of three English fictions each. The corpora compiled for the current study are comprised of translator Lee Inkyu’s translation corpus and translator Kim Oksoo’s translation corpus. Through the ‘n-gram’ analysis, the most frequent words (MFWs) in the English texts were identified. Among the identified MFWs, ‘as if’ comparisons were chosen to be examined closely. Then the corresponding words and contexts to the ‘as if’ comparisons were extracted from the translator corpora, and the n-gram analysis for the newly compiled translation corpora followed. Consistent patterns were observed in the two translators’ multiple translation texts. The stylistic features found for each translator in this study can be used in translator attribution analysis: 1) when one or more of the two translators in question is considered to be the probable translator of an anonymously translated text and 2) by comparing the translator(s)’s stylistic traits with the anonymously translated text.

Research on the Application of Language Transfer Theory BasedonComputerAided TranslationSoftware inRussian Teaching

At present, the function of Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) is mainly aimed at the level of translation skills and translation effect, and its application in language teaching is still lack of in-depth discussion, especially the establishment of translation corpus and the research of computer translation laboratory in language theory and practice teaching. Based on this, this paper first analyses the development and utilization of language transfer theory, then studies the utilization of computer-aided translation software in Russian teaching, and finally gives the utilization strategy of language transfer theory based on computer-aided translation software in Russian teaching.

Application of data storage and information search in english translation corpus

Application of data storage and information search in english translation corpus

(Semi)peripheries in contact

This article widens the perspective of indirect translation (ITr) research by focusing on the range of mediating languages and with a corpus of all indirect translations into a specific language (Swedish) during 2000–2015. The following issues will be described and explained: which languages are used as mediating languages (MLs), what their respective proportions look like, and which possible reasons for using a language other than English as the ML can be identified. The corpus reveals that out of all novels translated into Swedish during the period under study, 1.3% (70 novels) were indirect translations, and out of these 70, more than two thirds have English as the ML. A search into the cases where English has not been used produced a list of suggested reasons regarding the choice of ML. The most often occurring explanation seems to be that no English translation existed, or that such a translation was already indirect.