Neural machine translation between similar south-Slavic languages

This paper describes the ADAPT-DCU machine translation systems built for the WMT 2020 shared task on Similar Language Translation. We explored several set-ups for NMT for Croatian–Slovenian and Serbian–Slovenian language pairs in both translation directions. Our experiments focus on different amounts and types of training data: we first apply basic filtering on the OpenSubtitles training corpora, then we perform additional cleaning of remaining misaligned segments based on character n-gram matching. Finally, we make use of additional monolingual data by creating synthetic parallel data through back-translation. Automatic evaluation shows that multilingual systems with joint Serbian and Croatian data are better than bilingual, as well as that character-based cleaning leads to improved scores while using less data. The results also confirm once more that adding back-translated data further improves the performance, especially when the synthetic data is similar to the desired domain of the development and test set. This, however, might come at a price of prolonged training time, especially for multitarget systems

TADA: Task-Agnostic Dialect Adapters for English

Large Language Models, the dominant starting point for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, fail at a higher rate for speakers of English dialects other than Standard American English (SAE). Prior work addresses this using task-specific data or synthetic data augmentation, both of which require intervention for each dialect and task pair. This poses a scalability issue that prevents the broad adoption of robust dialectal English NLP. We introduce a simple yet effective method for task-agnostic dialect adaptation by aligning non-SAE dialects using adapters and composing them with task-specific adapters from SAE. Task-Agnostic Dialect Adapters (TADA) improve dialectal robustness on 4 dialectal variants of the GLUE benchmark without task-specific supervision.Comment: 5 Pages; ACL Findings Paper 202

Prevođenje za višejezične zajednice

This paper summarizes the translation methods for multilingual communities. In today’s world of globalization, the translational scope of work increases as the interest in languages grows. The aim of the paper is to show the translation challenges when facing multilingual communities. The first part of the paper covers the definitions of multilingualism and terms related with the emphasis on the European Union, but with the comparison to institutions and countries outside of the EU. The second part gives an insight into the problems from legal and linguistic point of view and it also explains the solutions to the same problems. Furthermore, considering that Croatia is a full member state of the European Union now, its linguistic and legal policies will be investigated as well

Prevođenje za višejezične zajednice

This paper summarizes the translation methods for multilingual communities. In today’s world of globalization, the translational scope of work increases as the interest in languages grows. The aim of the paper is to show the translation challenges when facing multilingual communities. The first part of the paper covers the definitions of multilingualism and terms related with the emphasis on the European Union, but with the comparison to institutions and countries outside of the EU. The second part gives an insight into the problems from legal and linguistic point of view and it also explains the solutions to the same problems. Furthermore, considering that Croatia is a full member state of the European Union now, its linguistic and legal policies will be investigated as well

RuLearn: an Open-source Toolkit for the Automatic Inference of Shallow-transfer Rules for Machine Translation

This paper presents ruLearn, an open-source toolkit for the automatic inference of rules for shallow-transfer machine translation from scarce parallel corpora and morphological dictionaries. ruLearn will make rule-based machine translation a very appealing alternative for under-resourced language pairs because it avoids the need for human experts to handcraft transfer rules and requires, in contrast to statistical machine translation, a small amount of parallel corpora (a few hundred parallel sentences proved to be sufficient). The inference algorithm implemented by ruLearn has been recently published by the same authors in Computer Speech & Language (volume 32). It is able to produce rules whose translation quality is similar to that obtained by using hand-crafted rules. ruLearn generates rules that are ready for their use in the Apertium platform, although they can be easily adapted to other platforms. When the rules produced by ruLearn are used together with a hybridisation strategy for integrating linguistic resources from shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation into phrase-based statistical machine translation (published by the same authors in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, volume 55), they help to mitigate data sparseness. This paper also shows how to use ruLearn and describes its implementation.Research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through projects TIN2009-14009-C02-01 and TIN2012-32615, by Generalitat Valenciana through grant ACIF/2010/174, and by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement PIAP-GA-2012-324414 (Abu-MaTran)

Balkan as a metaphor in the film composition of Goran Bregovic

The focus of this paper is the film composition of composer Goran Bregovic (born 1950) and the country of his birth Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia has undergone many major political changes over the past century and its ethno-political history over the past fifteen years could be considered as one of the most turbulent of our time. The aim of this thesis is to uncover the conceptual principles behind Bregovic’s unique approach to soundtrack music in order to create appropriate musical analogies in film composition. Bregovic’s musical career in the iconic Yugoslav rock band Bijelo dugme (White Button), his interest in the traditional Balkan music and collaborations with the Yugoslav film director Emir Kusturica were the stepping stones for him to develop an artistic profile as one of the world’s most demanding film composers. The dissertation addresses Bregovic’s initial conceptual approaches to the soundtrack writing in both Yugoslav and international film productions. Starting with the first international success, the score for Kusturica’s Don za vesanje (Time of the Gypsies), Bregovic’s approach to soundtrack writing has mainly been conceptually relevant to the particular ideological nomenclature of the depicted theatrical conflict in the given films. Such ideologically based compositional principle has enabled Bregovic to work with various types of recontextualisation of traditional Balkan music in both Yugoslav and international film productions. The research unfolds the concepts behind the metaphoric use of Balkan music in three analysed films and connects the compositional frameworks to the socio-cultural history of Yugoslavia (and particularly the composer’s native Bosnia and Herzegovina from the early thirteenth or fourteenth century to the present day), Bregovic’s musical history prior to these film productions and the film directors’ approaches to the depicted dramatic conflict in the given productions. The final part of the thesis discusses the relevance between the researched topic and the author’s own creative work in the field of original composition that is inspired by various types of traditional Balkan music

The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul

This book traces translation and interpreting practices in the Habsburg Empire’s (1848-1918) administration, courts and diplomatic service, and takes account of the “habitualised” translation carried out in everyday life. It then details the flows of translation among the Habsburg crownlands and between these and other European languages, with a special focus on Italian–German exchange. Applying a broad concept of “cultural translation” and working with sociological tools, the book addresses the mechanisms by which translation and interpreting constructs cultures, and delineates a model of the Habsburg Monarchy’s “pluricultural space of communication” that is also applicable to other multilingual settings. German version of the book: http://e-book.fwf.ac.at/o:18Das Buch befasst sich mit der Übersetzungs- und Dolmetschpraxis der Habsburgermonarchie zwischen 1848 und 1918 in der Verwaltung, bei Gericht, im diplomatischen Dienst und als tägliche Alltagspraxis. Analysiert werden ebenso die Übersetzungsströme zwischen den einzelnen Sprachen der Kronländer und mit Ländern außerhalb der Monarchie; der Fokus dieser Untersuchungen wird schließlich auf die Übersetzungen aus dem Italienischen gelegt. Unter Anwendung des Konzepts der „kulturellen Übersetzung“ und auf Pierre Bourdieu basierender translationsoziologischer Methoden untersucht das Buch die kulturkonstruierenden Mechanismen von Translation und skizziert einen „plurikulturellen Kommunikationsraum der Habsburgermonarchie“, der auch auf andere mehrsprachige Räume anwendbar ist. Deutsche Version des Buches: http://e-book.fwf.ac.at/o:1