What Level of Quality can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?

Given the rise of a new approach to MT, Neural MT (NMT), and its promising performance on different text types, we assess the translation quality it can attain on what is perceived to be the greatest challenge for MT: literary text. Specifically, we target novels, arguably the most popular type of literary text. We build a literary-adapted NMT system for the English-to-Catalan translation direction and evaluate it against a system pertaining to the previous dominant paradigm in MT: statistical phrase-based MT (PBSMT). To this end, for the first time we train MT systems, both NMT and PBSMT, on large amounts of literary text (over 100 million words) and evaluate them on a set of twelve widely known novels spanning from the the 1920s to the present day. According to the BLEU automatic evaluation metric, NMT is significantly better than PBSMT (p < 0.01) on all the novels considered. Overall, NMT results in a 11% relative improvement (3 points absolute) over PBSMT. A complementary human evaluation on three of the books shows that between 17% and 34% of the translations, depending on the book, produced by NMT (versus 8% and 20% with PBSMT) are perceived by native speakers of the target language to be of equivalent quality to translations produced by a professional human translator.Comment: Chapter for the forthcoming book "Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice" (Springer

Domain adaptation strategies in statistical machine translation: a brief overview

© Cambridge University Press, 2015.Statistical machine translation (SMT) is gaining interest given that it can easily be adapted to any pair of languages. One of the main challenges in SMT is domain adaptation because the performance in translation drops when testing conditions deviate from training conditions. Many research works are arising to face this challenge. Research is focused on trying to exploit all kinds of material, if available. This paper provides an overview of research, which copes with the domain adaptation challenge in SMT.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluation of MIRACLE approach results for CLEF 2003

This paper describes MIRACLE (Multilingual Information RetrievAl for the CLEf campaign) approach and results for the mono, bi and multilingual Cross Language Evaluation Forum tasks. The approach is based on the combination of linguistic and statistic techniques to perform indexing and retrieval tasks

Empirical studies in translation and discourse (Volume 14)

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019

Machine translation evaluation through post-editing measures in audio description

Departament de Traducció i InterpretacióThe number of accessible audiovisual products and the pace at which audiovisual content is made accessible need to be increased, reducing costs whenever possible. The implementation of different technologies which are already available in the translation field, specifically machine translation technologies, could help reach this goal in audio description for the blind and partially sighted. Measuring machine translation quality is essential when selecting the most appropriate machine translation engine to be implemented in the audio description field for the English-Catalan language combination. Automatic metrics and human assessments are often used for this purpose in any specific domain and language pair. This article proposes a methodology based on both objective and subjective measures for the evaluation of five different and free online machine translation systems. Their raw machine translation outputs and the post-editing effort that is involved are assessed using eight different scores. Results show that there are clear quality differences among the systems assessed and that one of them is the best rated in six out of the eight evaluation measures used. This engine would therefore yield the best freely machine-translated audio descriptions in Catalan presumably reducing the audio description process turnaround and costs

Empirical studies in translation and discourse

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019

The invisibility of the translator in environmental translation

[ES] La visibilidad del traductor ha sido una cuestión ampliamente debatida en los estudios de traducción a partir de posiciones ideológicas distintas, sobre todo durante el denominado postestructuralismo. A diferencia de otras tipologías como la traducción audiovisual o la literaria, en la especializada son pocos los casos donde aparece su nombre, como demostramos en un trabajo de investigación anterior, en el que, a partir de un corpus ambidireccional en catalán de textos medioambientales, sólo en un 16% de los casos se explicitaba el nombre del traductor (Bracho, 2004, p. 318). En este trabajo, pues, estudiamos una muestra actual, con rasgos similares a la de aquel corpus, para analizar su perfil y determinar cuál es el comportamiento, en este sentido, más de una década después de nuestras conclusiones anteriores.[EN] The question concerning the visibility of the translator has been widely discussed in translation studies from different ideological positions, especially during the so-called post-structuralism period. Unlike other types of translation such as audiovisual or literary translation, in the case of specialized translation the translator¿s name rarely appears, as demonstrated in previous research, in which, from an ambidirectional corpus in Catalan of environmental texts, in only 16% of cases was the translator¿s name made explicit (Bracho, 2004, p.¿318). In the present article, therefore, we study a current sample with similar features to that of the original corpus, with the aim of analyzing its profile and determining the behaviour, in this sense, more than a decade after our previous conclusions.This article has received financial support from research projects FFI2015-68867-P, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.Bracho Lapiedra, L.; Mac Donald, P. (2017). The invisibility of the translator in environmental translation. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics. 30(2):440-464. https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.00002.braS44046430

Exploring the translation of animated films : quantifying audiences’ perception of characters that speak in different varieties of English, Spanish and Catalan

The visibility of language variation in films has become a challenge to translation for dubbing, and the need arises to understand how the process of translating variation can influence the product in significant ways. By carrying out a quantitative study, we answered questions such as whether the practice is acceptable amongst audiences, or whether some language choices alter the perception of certain characters. We measured the perception of ten opposed personality traits amongst native audiences in English, Spanish and Catalan using a Semantic Differential Scale, and assessed the global impression of characters that had been translated with and without the use of varieties. The results show that characters overall are perceived the same way across languages regardless of whether they use varieties in or outside the mainstream, and conclude that this tool can be used to quantify and compare the same characters across languages

¿Es el discurso académico preciso cuando se apoya en la traducción automática?

El discurso académico ha despertado interés entre investigadores y profesores (Deroey, 2015; Mauranen, 2012; Hyland, 2010), en particular el uso de marcadores metadiscursivos. Sin embargo, se ha prestado poca atención a estas características apoyadas por la traducción automática (TA) en los contextos de AICLE. El objetivo del presente artículo es describir el uso y la frecuencia de los enfatizadores y atenuadores empleados en los ámbitos de la historia y la psicología y analizar la precisión de los equivalentes obtenidos en dos plataformas de TA, en concreto, DeepL y Google Translate. Para ello, se ha elaborado un pequeño corpus de dos seminarios y se han aplicado métodos cualitativos y cuantitativos para determinar la frecuencia y la precisión de los recursos lingüísticos bajo estudio. Los resultados han revelado que, si bien los elementos interaccionales proporcionados por la TA son precisos, pueden producirse omisiones y errores de traducción. Estas conclusiones pueden ser relevantes para los profesores de AICLE interesados en el discurso académico, así como para los investigadores de traducción que trabajan con corpus bilingües y multilingües y evalúan la exactitud de las herramientas de traducción.Classroom discourse has aroused interest among scholars and educators (Deroey, 2015; Mauranen, 2012; Hyland, 2010), particularly the use of metadiscoursal markers. However, little attention has been paid to these features when they are supported by machine translation (MT) engines in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) contexts. The aim of this paper is to describe the use and frequency of hedges and boosters employed in the fields of History and Heritage and Psychology and analyse the accuracy of the equivalents obtained from two MT engines, namely DeepL and Google Translate. To this end, a small corpus consisting of two seminars was compiled and qualitative and quantitative methods were implemented to determine the frequency and the accuracy of the linguistic structures under study. The results revealed that even though the interactional devices provided by MT engines are highly accurate, some omissions and mistranslations may occur. These findings may be valuable for CLIL lecturers interested in classroom discourse, as well as for translation researchers working with bilingual and multilingual corpora who seek to assess the accuracy of translation tools