Translation Problems Research Articles

К проблеме художественного перевода поэзии У. Стивенса

К проблеме художественного перевода поэзии У. Стивенса

Indicators of innovation in accounting and statistics systems: Possibilities of analytical comparison

Subject. The article considers correct presentation of data on innovations. Primary information about innovations should be collected by accounting system. On its basis, organizations should fill out primary statistical observation forms. However, the statistical methodology is not linked to the methodology for generating information on innovations in the accounting system. As a result, statistics gets incomplete and unreliable information, which prevents correct analytical comparison and adequate management decisions. Objectives. The study aims to critically assess the regulatory framework for innovation, identify problems preventing correct generation of information on innovation in the accounting system and its translation into forms of primary statistical observation, develop a methodology to overcome these barriers. Methods. The study employs the systems approach, comparison, method of systematization and generalization of data, and the dialectical approach, using the axiomatic scientific method. Results. We assessed the regulatory and legislative framework of Russia in the field of innovation, systematized the opinions of Russian scientists on the problems of preparing information on innovation in the accounting system, offered a methodology to correctly generate information on innovation in the accounting system and transmit it to the statistical accounting system. Conclusions. The proposed methodology will not fully solve the problem of correct translation of innovation data. It is required to create a single digital platform for gradual harmonization of accounting system and national accounts.

ВОПРОСЫ ПЕРЕВОДА СТРУКТУРНЫХ ВЗАИМОСВЯЗЕЙ В ДИСКУРСИВНЫХ ТЕКСТАХ ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫХ ТЕХНОЛОГИЙ

The article deals with the main ways of studying the problem of translation of structural relationships of discursive texts and subspecies of special discourse in the field of information technology, each of which has an author, recipient, purpose and is implemented in different genres of special discourse. Translation of structural relationships is the final level of translation of the entire information technology discourse text, from the source English language into the translating Kyrgyz language, or into the translating Russian language. In this case, the translator aims to transfer the entire structure and semantics of the translated units of lexical and grammatical level in such a way that all of them together would form a complete picture of the discourse text in the translating language, if possible, adequate to that in the source text. The difficulties encountered by translators in dealing with scientific and technical texts in the field of information technology (press releases, instructions, website and user's guide) are identified.

Investigating Saudi Student Translators’ Difficulties and Strategies in Translating English Culture-bound and Idiomatic Expressions: A Quantitative Study

Given the scarcity of studies looking into EFL student translators’ difficulties and strategies revealed in tasks involving translation of English idioms, this study inspected both the translation problems and strategies reported by Saudi university students majoring in English translation when translating English culture-bound expressions and idioms into Arabic. To achieve this aim, the researchers recruited a random sample of 90 Saudi female students to complete a 30-item translation test that required written translation, followed by a short self-devised questionnaire. Validity and reliability for both study instruments were established by test-piloting and translation verification checks. The various translation strategies used by the participants were categorized according to existing strategic processing frameworks developed by Baker (1992) and Newmark (1998). This study revealed how the process of translating English idioms posed some difficulties for most of participating student translators. In particular, two main translation problems were observed: unsuccessful attempts to achieve item equivalence into Arabic, and inadequate knowledge of strategic translation. Moreover, the study reported a variety of five main translation strategies (paraphrasing, partial equivalence, omissions, use of precise English expressions, and total equivalence) being used in the test. Drawing on the study findings, some pedagogical implications and recommendations were presented and discussed.

A Study on Sports Advertisement Translation from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

With the study of Skopos theory, the paper searches for the translation strategies of sports advertisements. Based on the study of language characteristics of sports advertisements, the paper compares the linguistic differences between Chinese and English sports advertisements. This paper briefly discusses some problems of sports advertisement translation. By analyzing the translation strategies adopted by different translators, the paper attempts to find appropriate solutions to problems of translating. These solutions touch on four aspects, including adherence to Skopos theory, respecting foreign cultures, mastering the linguistic features of sports advertisements in English and Chinese, and achieving the function of communication. The paper draws the following conclusions: there are differences and similarities between Chinese and English sports advertisements. Translators can choose different methods to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers with the guidance of Skopos theory. Moreover, the Skopos theory is the best way to assess the quality of translation.

Difficulties and Some Solutions for Vietnamese – English Translation of English Majored Juniors at Tay Do University in Viet Nam

The research studies the difficulties and some solutions for Vietnamese – English translation of English majored juniors at Tay Do University. The participants are one hundred third year students. Thanks to the questionnaire and translation test, the study finds out the common translation problems that almost students face in translation process. They are vocabulary, grammar and culture. Thus, it is very essential to have some solutions for students to improve translation skill. This paper might be useful to help students recognize their common mistakes and then apply the suitable solutions to improve translation.

CycleDRUMS: automatic drum arrangement for bass lines using CycleGAN

The two main research threads in computer-based music generation are the construction of autonomous music-making systems and the design of computer-based environments to assist musicians. In the symbolic domain, the key problem of automatically arranging a piece of music was extensively studied, while relatively fewer systems tackled this challenge in the audio domain. In this contribution, we propose CycleDRUMS, a novel method for generating drums given a bass line. After converting the waveform of the bass into a mel-spectrogram, we can automatically generate original drums that follow the beat, sound credible, and be directly mixed with the input bass. We formulated this task as an unpaired image-to-image translation problem, and we addressed it with CycleGAN, a well-established unsupervised style transfer framework designed initially for treating images. The choice to deploy raw audio and mel-spectrograms enabled us to represent better how humans perceive music and to draw sounds for new arrangements from the vast collection of music recordings accumulated in the last century. In the absence of an objective way of evaluating the output of both generative adversarial networks and generative music systems, we further defined a possible metric for the proposed task, partially based on human (and expert) judgment. Finally, as a comparison, we replicated our results with Pix2Pix, a paired image-to-image translation network, and we showed that our approach outperforms it.

Unsupervised class-to-class translation for domain variations

The majority of image-to-image translation models tend to struggle in varying domain settings. For one varying domain, samples vary significantly in shape and size and have no domain labels. This paper proposes an unsupervised class-to-class translation model based on conditional contrastive learning to tackle the domain variations problem. The initial hypothesis is that the latent modalities of two varying domains are categorizable by style differences of different samples and turn the image-to-image translation problem into class-to-class translation. Firstly, unsupervised semantic clustering is performed for each domain to divide them into multiple classes and then leverage the classification features of different classes to perform class-to-class translation. Two conditional contrastive learning loss functions for each domain are proposed to perform unsupervised semantic clustering and decompose it into multiple classes. Then in the class-to-class translation stage, the classification features of different classes are employed to learn the latent modalities. The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods by employing the latent modalities of different classes. The sample code is available at https://github.com/c1a1o1/ucct.

Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation Improvement Using Source-Side Monolingual Data

Despite the many proposals to solve the neural machine translation (NMT) problem of low-resource languages, it continues to be difficult. The issue becomes even more complicated when few resources cover only a single domain. In this paper, we discuss the applicability of a source-side monolingual dataset of low-resource languages to improve the NMT system for such languages. In our experiments, we used Wolaytta–English translation as a low-resource language. We discuss the use of self-learning and fine-tuning approaches to improve the NMT system for Wolaytta–English translation using both authentic and synthetic datasets. The self-learning approach showed +2.7 and +2.4 BLEU score improvements for Wolaytta–English and English–Wolaytta translations, respectively, over the best-performing baseline model. Further fine-tuning the best-performing self-learning model showed +1.2 and +0.6 BLEU score improvements for Wolaytta–English and English–Wolaytta translations, respectively. We reflect on our contributions and plan for the future of this difficult field of study.

Confucian Translation Problems and a Phenomenological Solution

Traditional Chinese Confucian ideas, such as such as Tian???, Dao???, and Ren???, generally run counter to Western theoretical expectations, and are difficult to express in correspondence with Western philosophy. It is really surprising to find that, for a long time, they were loosely and smoothly translated by uniform translation (or word-for-word translation). As a result, the story of Confucian thought is concealed or distorted in Western concepts and discourse structures. The paper applies phenomenology to the question of Confucian translations. It explicitly embraces a new framework of translation, the goal of which is to engage us to rethink the unsayable of Confucianism, question the sayable we take for granted, and better promote the understanding of Confucianism in the West.

The problem of translating Chinese policy-related expressions: a case study of wenming (‘civilised’)

Abstract This paper explores the difficulties of translating Chinese expressions frequently used in communicating governmental policies to the public. In particular, we focus on the expression wenming 文明, a term with manifold meanings and uses, which often ends up being translated into English simply as ‘civilised’. This translational convention is problematic because wenming in Chinese tends to be used in many collocations where the English civilised sounds distinctly alien. In order to systematically investigate this translational problem, we propose a bottom-up tri-partite approach to the study of Chinese policy expressions in general and wenming in particular. This novel mixed-method approach not only allows us to go beyond essentialist generalisations about expressions frequented in Chinese political discourse, but more importantly it allows us to unearth and label practical difficulties faced by translators.

Pix2Pix and Deep Neural Network-Based Deep Learning Technology for Predicting Vortical Flow Fields and Aerodynamic Performance of Airfoils

Traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods are usually used to obtain information about the flow field over an airfoil by solving the Navier–Stokes equations for the mesh with boundary conditions. These methods are usually costly and time-consuming. In this study, the pix2pix method, which utilizes conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) for image-to-image translation, and a deep neural network (DNN) method were used to predict the airfoil flow field and aerodynamic performance for a wind turbine blade with various shapes, Reynolds numbers, and angles of attack. Pix2pix is a universal solution to the image-to-image translation problem that utilizes cGANs. It was successfully implemented to predict the airfoil flow field using fully implicit high-resolution scheme-based compressible CFD codes with genetic algorithms. The results showed that the vortical flow fields of the thick airfoils could be predicted well using the pix2pix method as a result of deep learning.

Possible Translation Problems, Their Causes, and Solutions in Agile Localization of Software

This paper presents some initial insights into practical translation problems that can occur during agile localization. Although agile localization is not a novel approach to software localization, the range of possible translation problems and their causes and solutions have not yet been described.
 In order to write this paper, an ad hoc monolingual English corpus made up of user interface strings of one agile localized software product was used. The corpus was analyzed string by string, and various causes of translation problems, mostly relating to lacking context, were identified. The paper presents and discusses sample cases of these problems.
 This paper tries to show that while agile localization can be used as an alternative to traditional localization, the development team must be open to cooperation with the localization team in order for agile localization to be successfully implemented; otherwise, problems will occur.

Grammatical transformations in translation of political speeches

The paper is devoted to the problem of translation of political speeches, which is extremely relevant today, as political activity plays a special role in society, affects the country’s place in the international arena and its relations with other coun-tries. Politicians have the opportunity to appeal to both the international community and their compatriots, gain recognition, demonstrate their leadership and represent their country in the best possible way via speeches. Translation of political speeches is considered to be one of the most complicated types of translation, which is the area of increased linguistic responsibility. Translation transformations, which are defined as certain structural or semantic changes that are the result of lexical and grammatical differences in languages, are used to achieve translation equivalence (translation adequacy) despite the differences in the formal and semantic systems of two languages. The research is aimed at examining the peculiarities of political speeches and difficulties arising in the process of their rendering into Ukrainian. This paper consists of six main sections. The first is an introduction to the study. The second examines the definition and features of political speeches given by national and foreign scientists. The third section explains the methodology used in the study and the data selection process. In the course of analysis, the existing scientific literature concerning the topic at hand providing valid grounds for the practical part of the work has been analyzed and grammatical translation transformation examples have been selected and examined. The research data was taken from the website of the US Embassy in Ukraine. Thereafter the focus shifts to challenges the students face in translation of political speeches and highlights the grammatical transformations classification that constituted the theoretical basis of the research. The fifth section is devoted to analyzing the data and the last section summarizes the findings of the study.

Language function and literary translation: the realisation of transculturation in the translation of Sans Famille from French to Igbo

Translation as an exercise was born out of the need to comprehend texts written in foreign languages. There are two sides to this comprehension; the text and the reader of the translated version. Every literary text has its target audience; in the same manner, the translated versions have their target audiences. In translating, one tries to create a text that would be comprehensible to the target audience; to effectively create this, one must consider several factors, one of which is culture. Culture is often richly represented in literature. This study aims at finding a solution to one of the problems of literary translation: the means of depicting European culture to an African audience. The study illustrates the relationship between Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and translation through translating Hector Malot’s novel Sans Famille (2006) from French to Igbo. To adapt the translated version to an Igbo audience, French cultural elements are replaced with those existing in Igbo culture, but having the same meaning as those seen in the French text. This is known as cultural adaptation or transculturation. This study realises transculturation by applying the semio-pragmatic translation theory. The result shows that transculturation leads to the creation of a new text.

Differentiable Histogram Loss Functions for Intensity-based Image-to-Image Translation.

We introduce the HueNet - a novel deep learning framework for a differentiable construction of intensity (1D) and joint (2D) histograms and present its applicability to paired and unpaired image-to-image translation problems. The key idea is an innovative technique for augmenting a generative neural network by histogram layers appended to the image generator. These histogram layers allow us to define two new histogram-based loss functions for constraining the structural appearance of the synthesized output image and its color distribution. Specifically, the color similarity loss is defined by the Earth Mover's Distance between the intensity histograms of the network output and a color reference image. The structural similarity loss is determined by the mutual information between the output and a content reference image based on their joint histogram. Although the HueNet can be applied to a variety of image-to-image translation problems, we chose to demonstrate its strength on the tasks of color transfer, exemplar-based image colorization, and edges → photo, where the colors of the output image are predefined. The code is available at https://github.com/mor-avi-aharon-bgu/HueNet.git.

Problems of Literary Translation in the Linguistic and Cultural Aspect

The article analyzes the problems of literary translation in the linguoculturological aspect: the authors pay attention to the semantic inconsistency inherent in lexemes in the source text and lexemes in the target language, give examples of semantic inconsistencies that arise due to the lack of equivalence of individual lexemes that have ethnocultural significance in the language picture of the world of the original work , reveal various variants of semantic relationships. The main part of the article analyzes various ontological errors that occur when translating a literary text due to the discrepancy between the language pictures of the world of the author and the translator on the example of the work of Chechen folklore - illi “Deer” and the lyrical works of the Balkarian poet K. Kuliyev. The authors clearly demonstrate that without the translator having background knowledge of the history and culture of the people to whom the original work belongs, it is impossible to achieve the adequacy of literary translation, while the ideal situation is when the translator is bilingual and, accordingly, the bearer of both linguistic worldviews, is able to correlate them , avoiding contradictions and mental and cultural distortions in translation.

Структурно-семантичні характеристики термінологічної лексики в художньому творі та особливості її перекладу (на матеріалі роману Джона Грішема «Фірма»)

The article substantiates the importance of the problem of adequate translation of English economic terms into the Ukrainian language, as they carry a serious semantic load in artistic works. The source of the factual material was John Grisham’s novel «The Firm». The purpose of the work is to show on the material of an artistic work how professional and terminological vocabulary is used as one of the means of artistic imagery and to conduct an analysis of the structural and semantic characteristics of the terminology and the peculiarities of its translation into the Ukrainian language. The total volume of the sample is 786 terms, of which 458 are English economic terminological combinations. As a result of the analysis, it was established that English economic terminological phrases are formed according to two- and three-component models, characterized by different degrees of usage in the language. The most productive model of the syntactic method of term formation is adjective + noun. It is noted that, in general, economic terms have the same ways of translation from English into Ukrainian as all other terms. The main problem of translation of English economic terminological combinations is their ambiguity not only among different branches of science, but also within the economic field itself. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the main techniques used in the translation of non-equivalent economic terminology from English to Ukrainian are calque or word-for-word translation and descriptive translation, transcription or transliteration is less often used.

Analysis of the Russian-Persian translation training program in Iran and ways to overcome existing problems

This article discusses the problems of teaching translation from Russian to Persian and back at Iranian universities, compares the program of Iranian audiences with the program of translation training in some leading countries of the world. The characteristic features of the translation training system in different countries are highlighted and described, from which it is possible to characterize the shortcomings of translation training in Iran. The purpose of the article is to study the existing shortcomings of translation training in Iran and ways to solve the problems outlined. The author pays special attention to the theory of translation and the basics of translation didactics, which help to find problems in the translation training program. The novelty of this article is that the problem of the translation training program from Russian into Persian has never been studied, and basically the issue of translation training in Iran has been little studied and requires further research. The results of this article are applied in connection with the improvement of the translation training system and, finally, the increase in the quality of translation. In conclusion, it is revealed that all the shortcomings of translation training in Iran arise from the use of non-modern methods of education of translators. The old method of teaching translation and ignoring the basics of the theory and didactics of translation are the reasons for the shortcomings in the translation training program in Iran.

The communicative strategy of sympathy: linguistic means of expression and problems of translation

The article is devoted to the analysis of linguistic means for describing the communicative strategy of sympathy. The study is based on the interpretation of the communicative strategy as a communication model aimed at planning the speech process. The article describes the linguistic means of expressing the communicative strategy of sympathy in English and the activity of using it. In the list of linguistic means, the following ones are marked with certain productivity: certain lexical items, in particular poor; standardized phrases, clichés, etc. The study analyzes the typical means of expressing sympathy, in particular language constructions, in the Ukrainian language. Some language means of expressing sympathy in the Ukrainian language reinforce the dynamic change of speech dynamics. The specificity of the communicative strategy of sympathy in both English and Ukrainian languages is characterized based on fiction. The techniques during the translation of the communicative strategy of sympathy from English to Ukrainian have been determined.