Multi-Retranslation Corpora: Visibility, Variation, Value, and Virtue

Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most ‘attitude’ (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of 40 German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers

Multi-Retranslation Corpora: Visibility, Variation, Value, and Virtue

Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most ‘attitude’ (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of 40 German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers

The Italian Retranslations of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: A Corpus-based Literary Analysis

The research goal is to clarify how and to what degree the modernist style and features of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are rendered in the eleven retranslations into Italian of this novel and whether these can be characterised as modernist novels themselves. A suitable methodology has been developed, which is drawn on the existing corpus methods for descriptive translation studies. Empirical evidence of the differences between target texts have been found, which in many cases have been interpreted as due to the translators’ voice or thumb-prints. The present research uses a systematic literary comparison of the retranslations by adopting a mixed-method and bottom-up (inductive) approach by developing an empirical corpus approach. This corpus is specifically tailored to identify and study both linguistic and non-linguistic modernist features throughout the texts such as stream of consciousness-indirect interior monologue and free indirect speech. All occurrences will be analysed in this thesis in the computations of inferential and comparative statistics such as lexical variety and lexical frequency. The target texts were digitised, and the resulting text files were then analysed by using a bespoke, novel computer program, which is capable of the mentioned functions not provided by commercially available software such as WordSmith Tools and WMatrix. Not only did this methodology enable performing in-depth explorations of micro- and macro-textual features, but it also allowed a mixed-method approach combining close-reading qualitative analysis with systematic quantitative comparisons. The obtained empirical results identify a progressive source-text orientation of the retranslations of Woolf’s style in a few aspects of a few target texts. The translators’ presence affected all the eleven target texts in register and style under the influence of the Italian translation norms usually attributed to the translation of literary classics

Improving the confidence of Machine Translation quality estimates

We investigate the problem of estimating the quality of the output of machine translation systems at the sentence level when reference translations are not available. The focus is on automatically identifying a threshold to map a continuous predicted score into “good ” / “bad ” categories for filtering out bad-quality cases in a translation post-edition task. We use the theory of Inductive Confidence Machines (ICM) to identify this threshold according to a confidence level that is expected for a given task. Experiments show that this approach gives improved estimates when compared to those based on classification or regression algorithms without ICM.

Induced hesitant 2-tuple linguistic aggregation operators with application in group decision making

In this article, hesitant 2-tuple linguistic arguments are used to evaluate the group decision making problems which have inter dependent or inter active attributes. Operational laws are developed for hesitant 2-tuple linguistic elements and based on these operational laws hesitant 2- tuple weighted averaging operator and generalized hesitant 2- tuple averaging operator are proposed. Combining Choquet integral with hesitant 2-tuple linguistic information, some new aggregation operators are defined, including the hesitant 2-tuple correlated averaging operator, the hesitant 2-tuple correlated geometric operator and the generalized hesitant 2-tuple correlated averaging operator. These proposed operators successfully manage the correlations among the elements. After investigating the properties of these operators, a multiple attribute decision making method based on these operators, is suggested. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the practicality and feasibility of proposed method

Personalized individual semantics in Computing with Words for supporting linguistic Group Decision Making. An Application on Consensus reaching

Yucheng Dong would like to acknowledge the financial support of grants (Nos. 71171160, 71571124) from NSF of China, and a grant (No.xq15b01) from SSEM key research center at Sichuan province. Enrique Herrera-Viedma and Luis Mart´ınez would like to acknowledge the FEDER funds under Grant TIN2013-40658-P and TIN2015-66524-P respectivelyIn group decision making (GDM) dealing with Computing with Words (CW) has been highlighted the importance of the statement, words mean different things for different people, because of its influence in the final decision. Different proposals that either grouping such different meanings (uncertainty) to provide one representation for all people or use multi-granular linguistic term sets with the semantics of each granularity, have been developed and applied in the specialized literature. Despite these models are quite useful they do not model individually yet the different meanings of each person when he/she elicits linguistic information. Hence, in this paper a personalized individual semantics (PIS) model is proposed to personalize individual semantics by means of an interval numerical scale and the 2-tuple linguistic model. Specifically, a consistency-driven optimization-based model to obtain and represent the PIS is introduced. A new CW framework based on the 2-tuple linguistic model is then defined, such a CW framework allows us to deal with PIS to facilitate CW keeping the idea that words mean different things to different people. In order to justify the feasibility and validity of the PIS model, it is applied to solve linguistic GDM problems with a consensus reaching process.National Natural Science Foundation of China 71171160 71571124Sichuan University skqy201606European Union (EU) TIN2013-40658-P TIN2015-66524-

Multi-retranslation corpora : visibility, variation, value, and virtue

Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most 'attitude' (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of 40 German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers

Selecting translations to be post-edited by Sentence-Level Automatic Quality Evaluation

[ES] La Traducción Automática (TA) es cada vez más creciente en la industria de la traducción que pide traducciones de calidad más rápidamente. A pesar de esto, las traducciones obtenidas con TA requieren post-edición para conseguir una alta calidad. Pero este esfuerzo para revisar todo es considerable. Por esta razón, presentamos un método para estimar automáticamente el error de traducción a nivel de frase. De este modo, el traductor puede distinguir entre las mejores y peores frases traducidas para evitar esfuerzo de post-edición ahorrando tiempo de post-editar frases bien traducidas y eliminando frases mal traducidas por ser mejor traducirlas sin usar la TA. El método propuesto mejora otros sistemas más simples, como los que utilizan solamente la longitud de las frases. Para este propósito, se entrena un modelo con características extraídas de las frases fuente y destino (sistema independiente de TA) y aquellas características que proporcionan más información son seleccionadas. Además, realizamos un estudio de clasificadores, métodos de selección y sus parámetros correspondientes.[EN] Machine Translation (MT) is increasingly growing in the translation industry, that more and more demands quality translations rapidly. Despite this, MT translations still requires postedition to achieve a high quality. But the effort made to revise everything is high and it is expensive. For this reason, we present a method to estimate automatically the translation error by sentence-level. Thereby, the translator can distinguish between better and worse translated sentences to avoid post-edition effort saving time post-editing good translated sentences or removing bad translated sentences because is better to translate it from scratch. The method proposed improves other simpler systems used, like the ones that use just the sentence length. For this purpose, a model is trained with features extracted from source and target sentences (MT system-independent) and those features that provide more information are selected. Moreover, we do a study of classifiers, selection methods and their corresponding parameters.Garcia Martinez, MM. (2012). Selecting translations to be post-edited by Sentence-Level Automatic Quality Evaluation. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/27256Archivo delegad

Traducción automática a nivel de documento como proceso de retraducción

Most of the current Machine Translation systems are designed to translate a document sentence by sentence ignoring discourse information and producing incoherencies in the final translations. In this paper we present some document-level-oriented post-processes to improve translations' coherence and consistency. Incoherences are detected and new partial translations are proposed. The work focuses on studying two phenomena: words with inconsistent translations throughout a text and also, gender and number agreement among words. Since we deal with specific phenomena, an automatic evaluation does not reflect significant variations in the translations. However, improvements are observed through a manual evaluation.Los sistemas de Traducción Automática suelen estar diseñados para traducir un texto oración por oración ignorando la información del discurso y provocando así la aparición de incoherencias en las traducciones. En este artículo se presentan varios sistemas que detectan incoherencias a nivel de documento y proponen nuevas traducciones parciales para mejorar el nivel de cohesión y coherencia global. El estudio se centra en dos casos: palabras con traducciones inconsistentes en un texto y la concordancia de género y número entre palabras. Dado que se trata de fenómenos concretos, los cambios no se ven reflejados en una evaluación automática global pero una evaluación manual muestra mejoras en las traducciones.Supported by an FPI grant within the OpenMT2 project (TIN2009-14675-C03) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) and by the TACARDI project (TIN2012-38523-C02) of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MEC)