Translation Industry Research Articles

The use of deep learning and AIoT technology in loan word translation

The purpose is to translate loan words accurately, standardise their use, and better integrate with Chinese culture. The role of intelligent translation in loan words translation is studied based on deep learning and intelligent Internet of things. Moreover, a new neural translation mechanism of divide and conquer strategy is proposed based on the original Artificial Intelligence (AI) translation technology. Its translation quality is tested and compared with manual translation. The new neural translation mechanism can achieve the accuracy of human daily language. The accuracy rate of system Mobile Number Portability (MNP) identification is 74.67%, the recall rate is 71.42% and the F-value is 74.01%. Moreover, the average time is 0.01s/character. Therefore, the research results suggest that the constructed AI translation can more efficiently complete the translation task, save a lot of time cost and labour cost and produce a crucial reference for the intelligent development of the translation industry.

The influence of fansubbing on the audiovisual translation industry in Italy

The influence of fansubbing on the audiovisual translation industry in Italy

Translation quality management in the AI Age. New technologies to perform translation quality assurance operations

This article presents a selection of some of the latest technologies to perform translation quality management operations such as quality assurance and translation quality assessment using artificial intelligence and machine learning; it also discusses the impact of these technological advances in the latest academic research trends and the translation industry.

The American 'House of Cards' – A View from a Cultural, Political and Translation-Related Perspective

The present article offers an introduction to the relationship between the entertainment and translation industry, arguing that dubbings and subtitles are by-products of the entertainment industry, directly contributing to the success of the show. It also deals with the translator’s competence, offering examples of translation challenges from the (in)famous American TV show, House of Cards, connected to terms and expressions pertaining to general knowledge of the world and of the United States. The Introduction offers an insight into audiovisual translation and its successful branches and explains binge-watching and binge-translation as well, also including several scholars’ analyses of the TV show. The Methodological Background describes how a collection of term bases came into being starting from the original English script and several Romanian subtitles of the episodes of official (DVD-release and Netflix) and amateur (freely available online) versions. This is followed by thirty examples in two sets, discussing the translation of terms belonging to general knowledge and US geopolitics in particular. The Conclusions section discusses the terms of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ translator irrespective of their qualifications, focusing instead on ‘quality assurance’, a rather subjective term. Certain corpus-based findings are also highlighted connected to the possibilities of relying on generalization, explicitation or calque referring to general culture and US politics focusing on the intelligibility of politicotainment, a term recently coined by Riegert.

Role of Translators and Interpreters in Global Business

This paper explores the effect of globalization on the translation industry and the demands it places on translators. The paper argues that translators are not only individuals with some knowledge of the source or target language, but they also often act as mediators between the discourse of the source culture and the discourse of the target audience. To be a successful translator, one has to possess the knowledge of both the general culture of the target audience, specialized knowledge within the domain of that particular text, and perfect knowledge of the target language, not to mention the ability to detect any particularities in the source text and language. The article argues for the imperative of equipping modern interpreters and translators with a set of extra-linguistic assets imposed by the modern economic structure of the world. The paper traces back the history of the English language as an example of the domineering linguistic power that has been solidified by socio-political and economic status leading up to considering it a globalized code. The outcome of this universal metamorphosis has reached such a point that it requires from people worldwide and namely in specific areas of trade to adapt to these exigencies. In this sense, global and business exchanges cannot be successfully realized without a strong probability of understanding the message issuing from the other. Hence the need to create interlinguistic agents that are able to minimize the existing nuances between people of the world primarily for universal economic reasons. Those people are supposed to reach beyond the linguistic requirements for the act of translation and to embrace the demands of the specific business field or area which in is in itself a part of competency within the boundaries of modern training impositions. The article contends as well for the need on the part of modern translators to embrace modern technological innovations that are supposed to be shielded to support the human trials to bring in concrete shape poles-apart nations. In a globalized world, technology invades all life domains where translation studies are no exception. The paper concludes by suggesting strategies for translators to position themselves as assets to their organization and to counteract the belief that anyone with language experience can translate.

Challenges and Countermeasures of Machine Translation to Translation and Interpretation under the Background of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, as a great trend, has already entered into many aspects of our life. While we enjoy the convenience it brings us, we also need to bear the impact it gives. Under the impact of artificial intelligence, the number of employees in many industries has decreased sharply, and even many jobs will no longer exist. In this context, machine translation, as an important aspect of artificial intelligence, has a great impact on traditional human translation. Machine translation, can accomplish many written translation tasks in shorter time but with higher quality. Even simultaneous interpretation, the Gold collar in translation industry, has been suffered unprecedented huge impact. In the face of such a situation, what shall translation major in Colleges and Universities do is an urgent problem.

Communication and interactions in cloud platform subtitling

This article explores recent developments in freelance subtitling work within the audio-visual translation (AVT) industry. During the 2010s, many LSPs operating globally moved their provision of paid, professional subtitling services to cloud platforms, and I argue that such platforms, while capable of generating collaborative environments, enact information patterns which weaken the communicative and collaborative aspects of production processes, while running the risk of compromising the quality of the subtitlers’ position.

Audiovisual Translation at the Service of the EU Public Communication 2.0

Communication is becoming more and more (audio)visual, social and mobile. This is true not only of the entertainment industry but also of commercial advertising and institutional public communication. Consequently, the audiovisual translation industry is flourishing. Although a growing array of products outside the field of entertainment are being localised and/or made accessible, they have received scant attention so far, whether in academic or professional circles. This is notably the case of the institutional video subgenre. This practice report will first address the importance of using increasingly multilingual and multimodal audiovisual products in EU external communication – a tool for reaching out to more citizens on social media and boosting their active participation at a time when populism and Euroscepticism are on the rise. The focus will then shift to the audiovisual communication of the Council of the EU. Through a case study which aims to investigate the internal localisation in all EU official languages of the “#Europeans” series of videos – produced for the 2019 EU elections – the rest of the paper will then outline the main features of the institutional audiovisual translation subgenre. It will also identify some opportunities for improvement: a more integrated and interdisciplinary approach which – together with reinforced collaboration with academia – could lead to a real multilingual creative process right from the initial steps of the audiovisual production process.

Translation industry: analytical review of trends, structure, requirements for translators

This paper deals with a complex analysis of the current trends and conditions of the development of the translation industry in the world and in Ukraine, the structure of the translation services market, profiles of its participants, requirements for translators. The results of the research will be taken into consideration in the process of the development of methods of teaching translation of texts on educational issues to student philologists for defining the structure and the content of the translator competence and the development of the assessment system for measuring its level. The results of the critical review of the relevant academic papers, study of investigations conducted by independent analytical agencies and survey reports released by professional translator organizations, content-analysis of translation companies and private and public translation departments web-sites show that the Ukrainian market of the translation services is a part of the global language industry which rapid evolution is influenced by external (globalization, economic recession, development of e-commerce and digital technologies, increasing amount of information) and internal (international connections, competitive environment, chaotic nature of business) factors that determine the peculiarities of translation services providers profiles, their relationships with translation buyers and collaboration with each other. The obtained results are of great importance for the organization and realization of the educational process as the translation industry realia incorporation into it will contribute to graduates’ awareness of the translation services market and their ability to meet its needs and requirements.

Analysis of Edit Operations for Post-editing Systems

Post-editing has become an important part not only of translation research but also in the global translation industry. While computer-aided translation tools, such as translation memories, are considered to be part of a translator's work, lately, machine translation (MT) systems have also been accepted by human translators. However, many human translators are still adopting the changes brought by translation technologies to the translation industry. This paper introduces a novel approach for seeking suitable pairs of n-grams when recommending n-grams (corresponding n-grams between MT and post-edited MT) based on the type of text (manual or administrative) and MT system used for machine translation. A tool that recommends and speeds up the correction of MT was developed to help the post-editors with their work. It is based on the analysis of words with the same lemmas and analysis of n-gram recommendations. These recommendations are extracted from sequence patterns of the mismatched words (MisMatch) between MT output and post-edited MT output. The paper aims to show the usage of morphological analysis for recommending the post-edit operations. It describes the usage of mismatched words in the n-gram recommendations for the post-edited MT output. The contribution consists of the methodology for seeking suitable pairs of words, n-grams and additionally the importance of taking into account metadata (the type of the text and/or style and MT system) when recommending post-edited operations.

Retraction Note: Ocean surface temperature simulation based on big data and accuracy of English translation of foreign trade vocabulary

The slight change of sea surface temperature (SST) may affect the marine climate, the coastal climate, and the distribution of aquatic resources. Therefore, in order to understand marine climate change and aquatic resources, long-term investigation of SST change tendency is particularly important. Satellite remote sensing is one of the effective means to monitor sea surface temperature. In the face of a large number of remote sensing data sources, it is very important to choose an appropriate multi-source remote sensing data fusion method to improve the inversion accuracy and coverage of sea surface temperature. Big data technology is becoming an important force to promote the development of national economy. In the process of accelerating the penetration of big data technology into various fields of economy and society, it promotes the change of production mode and greatly improves productivity. After the accuracy of ensemble Kalman filter in sea surface temperature fusion is verified by sea surface temperature simulation based on big data, the fused SST is processed into abnormal form and decomposed by empirical orthogonal function, and its spatial and temporal distribution characteristics are analyzed. Based on the above big data, big data technology makes the business English translation industry usher in earth-shaking changes. Massive translation information based on big data platform can not only improve the efficiency of business English translation, but also improve its translation accuracy. However, due to the short time of big data technology, cultural and pragmatic differences, and other factors, the personal development of business English translators is limited. Therefore, by combining the basic connotation and existing problems of business English translation, this paper puts forward strategies to improve translation skills from two aspects of the main body of the teacher and the main body of the learner, in order to improve the accuracy of English translation of foreign trade vocabulary.

Translation skills required by Master’s graduates for employment: Which are needed, which are not?

AbstractThere is ongoing debate about which skills translation students require for employment. Numerous “bridge the gap” studies draw on translation professionals in order to list the skills that graduates should have acquired. However, many of the available surveys indicate, with some regularity, that only a minority of graduates from Master’s programs in translation actually find stable employment in the translation industry. Here we report on a survey of graduates from the University of Melbourne and the skills that they say they require once in employment. The graduates who are employed in the translation industry prioritize skills that are significantly different from those prioritized by graduates employed in other sectors. This raises an underlying question of whether we are training for an industry or for society.

Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Labor Force Employed in the Translation Industry of Saudi Arabia

The on-going pandemic caused by COVID-19 has undoubtedly created huge impact not only to human health but to livelihood as well. The translation industry is a key player in the economy of multi-linguistic nations like Saudi Arabia, and the labor market inherent to it faces imminent challenges posed by this global health crisis. It is the intention of this study to look into the economic status of translators working in Saudi Arabia in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Email interviews were conducted to random translators from different agencies in the country. After a thorough descriptive analysis of their pre- and post-COVID labor situation, it was found that there was generally a decrease in income of the translators whose portfolio is comprised by the translation business by 50%. Nonetheless, there are very few of those who consider translation as the main source of income who benefitted from the situation. Translation rates also had to be reduced by 7% to 8% in order to become competitive in the market. This applies to the various sectors utilizing translation services including post-editing machine translation, transcreation, and localized engineering, among others. However, among the sectors covered in this study, the demand for translation services was observed to be most significant in the healthcare, life sciences, and medical and pharmaceutical sectors. It is then the hope of this study to contribute knowledge in finding effective means to alleviate the economic conditions of translators who, in one way or another, could be considered as frontliners in this trying time.

Translators’ manipulation of texts: the case of children’s books on gender equality

ABSTRACT This research applied the analytical method proposed by Kaniklidou and House to examine power manipulation in existing translations of children’s books that include gender equality issues in Taiwan. Fifty-one translations of gender-related picture books were analysed, and 411 instances of power manipulation phenomena were annotated. The study identified content explicitation and simplification as the most frequently used translation strategies, followed by cultural filtering, manipulation of ideology, sentimentalisation, infantilisation, and genre specificity. These categories overlapped and were closely related; instances of explicitation, cultural filtering, and ideological manipulation could occur in the same passage. The results of this study contribute to providing an objective basis for the development of gender equality education, and also serve as a reference for the translation industry, the government, and academia in enhancing or adjusting translation strategies, editing high-quality children’s books, strengthening the foundation of children’s language development, and promoting innovation and multi-faceted discussion.

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.

An empirical study of professional translators’ attitudes, use and awareness of Web 2.0 technologies, and implications for the adoption of emerging technologies and trends

This questionnaire-based study was conducted as a part of an MA Dissertation in the summer of 2010 (Gough, 2010a). It examines the trends within the translation industry which have developed in response to the evolution of the Web from Web 1.0 (the information web) to Web 2.0 (the social web) and places professional translators against the backdrop of these trends. The developments based on the principles of sharing, openness and collaboration associated with Web 2.0 can be seen as affecting the tools used by translators and the processes in which they engage. This study examines professional translators’ awareness and perception of the new open, collaborative tools and processes and the degree of tools usage and process participation. The key findings of this study highlight translators’ vague awareness and insufficient understanding of these trends, marginal use of the open tools and little engagement in the collaborative processes. The underlying factor determining translators’ awareness, perception and the use of these tools and processes is their attitude towards adopting new technologies, with an indication that professionals with innovative attitudes are more inclined to embrace the new trends and developments.

From crawling to sprinting: Community translation goes mainstream

The notion that “two heads are better than one” is hardly new when applied to translation. The entire corpus of Buddhist sutras was translated into Chinese collaboratively by foreign and Chinese monks over a thousand-year period which began in the 1st century A.D. (Chueung, 2006). However, the dominant model used today for translation in the commercial sector depends on a process that largely inhibits collaboration. This article presents some of the latest findings from research on the state of community translation, based on multiple market research studies carried out over a five-year period, including a comparative analysis of 100 community translation environments and interviews with stakeholders. The research reveals that, over the course of the last several years, translation industry participants have been moving away from the traditional process toward a more dynamic and collaborative model. As community-based models have grown in popularity, distinct types of environments have emerged as well.

Competences of translation project managers from the academic perspective: analysis of EMT programmes

ABSTRACT Project management has been established as a way to organise work in the translation industry. Although research on translator competences has become a cornerstone of Translation Studies, scant attention has been paid to the competences of translation project managers (PMs). The aim of this paper is to present the results obtained from a curricular analysis, in order to provide a definition of competences in translation project management based on the academic perspective of the current members of the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) network. This research is preceded by four studies that the author has conducted on this topic. Her purpose is to gather the perspectives of the different stakeholders who should be participating in the definition of competences, i.e. the professional sector and the academic disciplines involved (namely translation and project management). This paper offers an insight into the academic perspective by analysing EMT courses announced for the academic year 2020–2021 in which project management is taught. The results obtained from the curricular analysis presented here will be integrated into the insights gained from the author’s previous research, in order to obtain a more complete picture of translation project managers’ competences.

The role of automated evaluation techniques in online professional translator training.

The rapid technologisation of translation has influenced the translation industry’s direction towards machine translation, post-editing, subtitling services and video content translation. Besides, the pandemic situation associated with COVID-19 has rapidly increased the transfer of business and education to the virtual world. This situation has motivated us not only to look for new approaches to online translator training, which requires a different method than learning foreign languages but in particular to look for new approaches to assess translator performance within online educational environments. Translation quality assessment is a key task, as the concept of quality is closely linked to the concept of optimization. Automatic metrics are very good indicators of quality, but they do not provide sufficient and detailed linguistic information about translations or post-edited machine translations. However, using their residuals, we can identify the segments with the largest distances between the post-edited machine translations and machine translations, which allow us to focus on a more detailed textual analysis of suspicious segments. We introduce a unique online teaching and learning system, which is specifically “tailored” for online translators’ training and subsequently we focus on a new approach to assess translators’ competences using evaluation techniques—the metrics of automatic evaluation and their residuals. We show that the residuals of the metrics of accuracy (BLEU_n) and error rate (PER, WER, TER, CDER, and HTER) for machine translation post-editing are valid for translator assessment. Using the residuals of the metrics of accuracy and error rate, we can identify errors in post-editing (critical, major, and minor) and subsequently utilize them in more detailed linguistic analysis.

The Journey of Young Professionals in The Translation Market: A Study Exploring Opportunities for Translators in Tripoli

This study explores the current state of the translation job market from the perspective of recent translation graduates. It attempts to evaluate the efficiency of the academic and technical training programs of the Department of Translation (DoT) at the University of Tripoli. The study examines how well DoT prepared graduates for professional work. It collects insights and analyzes a database of a variety of status indicators such as employment conditions, career options available for new translation graduates, domains that translators regularly search for: salary and income, occupational standards including years of experience and skills and qualifications required by employers. Based on evidence collected from the database, there is a wide range of employment positions and domains in which a translation graduate can occupy. However, quantitative analysis of the survey administered to translation graduates indicates that most graduates tend to work as teachers and could not obtain jobs as translators due to a shortage of opportunities and low salary intake in the translation industry. The study reveals that experience is not specified, and applicants with limited experience are also valued by employers in the 21st century job market. Nevertheless, the results of the investigation also suggest that IT skills, advanced language knowledge, and strong interpersonal skills are all crucial elements for job-seekers with no significant amount of experience. Furthermore, most graduates have a medium to negative perception of the university training and did not feel prepared enough to join the labor market after graduation. Although the vast majority of participants claim that the current situation in Tripoli had a direct impact on their job-seeking experience, about a third of the total participants surveyed revealed that they managed to obtain opportunities abroad using their translation degree.