An Investigation into Automatic Translation of Prepositions in IT Technical Documentation from English to Chinese

Machine Translation (MT) technology has been widely used in the localisation industry to boost the productivity of professional translators. However, due to the high quality of translation expected, the translation performance of an MT system in isolation is less than satisfactory due to various generated errors. This study focuses on translation of prepositions from English into Chinese within technical documents in an industrial localisation context. The aim of the study is to reveal the salient errors in the translation of prepositions and to explore possible methods to remedy these errors. This study proposes three new approaches to improve the translation of prepositions. All approaches attempt to make use of the strengths of the two most popular MT architectures at the moment: Rule-Based MT (RBMT) and Statistical MT (SMT). The approaches include: firstly building an automatic preposition dictionary for the RBMT system; secondly exploring and modifing the process of Statistical Post-Editing (SPE) and thirdly pre-processing the source texts to better suit the RBMT system. Overall evaluation results (both human evaluation and automatic evaluation) show the potential of our new approaches in improving the translation of prepositions. In addition, the current study also reveals a new function of automatic metrics in assisting researchers to obtain more valid or purpose-specific human valuation results

A corpus-based comparative study on George Orwell’s 1984 Chinese translation strategies.

This paper adopts a corpus-based approach to compare the translation strategies employed by Dong Leshan (1979/1998) and Lau Shiuming (1984/2011) in their translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The linguistic features are first retrieved from our translation corpora using the corpus tools, ICTCLAS 5.0 and AntConc 3.4.3, and then compared and analyzed quantitatively. Statistics show that the two translators differ significantly in their employment of four types of function word: modal particles, conjunctions, prepositions, and numerals. Equivalent textual examples from the two translations are extracted and analyzed qualitatively, to illustrate how the use of these function words embodies different translation strategies. The analysis specifically focuses on the comparison between hypotactic and paratactic features in the English-Chinese translations. The findings in this study indicate that Dong shows the tendency of aiming to achieve formal equivalence to the English source language in his Chinese translation. By contrast, Lau tends to provide a translation that conforms to the customary convention of the Chinese target language by adding modal particles and adversative conjunctions as well as adjusting the sentence order, to make the implied meaning in a sentence explicitly for the target reader

Marker-based filtering of bilingual phrase pairs for SMT

State-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems make use of a large translation table obtained after scoring a set of bilingual phrase pairs automatically extracted from a parallel corpus. The number of bilingual phrase pairs extracted from a pair of aligned sentences grows exponentially as the length of the sentences increases; therefore, the number of entries in the phrase table used to carry out the translation may become unmanageable, especially when online, 'on demand' translation is required in real time. We describe the use of closed-class words to filter the set of bilingual phrase pairs extracted from the parallel corpus by taking into account the alignment information and the type of the words involved in the alignments. On four European language pairs, we show that our simple yet novel approach can filter the phrase table by up to a third yet still provide competitive results compared to the baseline. Furthermore, it provides a nice balance between the unfiltered approach and pruning using stop words, where the deterioration in translation quality is unacceptably high

Chinese-Catalan: A neural machine translation approach based on pivoting and attention mechanisms

This article innovatively addresses machine translation from Chinese to Catalan using neural pivot strategies trained without any direct parallel data. The Catalan language is very similar to Spanish from a linguistic point of view, which motivates the use of Spanish as pivot language. Regarding neural architecture, we are using the latest state-of-the-art, which is the Transformer model, only based on attention mechanisms. Additionally, this work provides new resources to the community, which consists of a human-developed gold standard of 4,000 sentences between Catalan and Chinese and all the others United Nations official languages (Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish). Results show that the standard pseudo-corpus or synthetic pivot approach performs better than cascade.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The role of linguistics in language teaching: the case of two, less widely taught languages - Finnish and Hungarian

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well suited for less widely used and less taught languages as it enables students to draw comparative and historical parallels, question terminologies and raise their sociolinguistic and pragmatic awareness. A linguistic approach also provides students with skills for further language learning

Staunin Ma Lane: Chinese Verse in Scots and English, translated by Brian Holton

No abstract available

English and Chinese Thought Patterns and Their Impact on Translation Teaching

Translation is widely accepted not only as a transformation of linguistic forms, but also as a particular activity of cross-cultural communication. As one of the most important aspects of culture, thought pattern will exert great influence upon translation. Totally four pairs of English and Chinese patterns are discussed, such as abstract thought vs. image thought, analytical thought vs. synthetical thought, object-centered thought vs. subject-centered thought, and linear thought vs. spiral thought. Based on the discussion, four translation techniques are put forward which will be quite essential in translation teaching. The techniques are such as transformation between animate subjects and inanimate subjects, transformation between nouns and verbs, transformation between prepositions and verbs, transformation between the end-weight sentences and the beginning-weight sentences

Grammatical errors in spoken english of University students in oral communication course

The present study examines the grammatical errors in spoken English of university students who are less proficient in English. The specific objectives of the study are to determine the types of errors and the changes in grammatical accuracy during the duration of the English for Social Purposes course focussing on oral communication. The language data were obtained from the simulated oral interactions of 42 students participating in five role play situations during the 14-week semester. Error analysis of 126 oral interactions showed that the five common grammar errors made by the learners are preposition, question, article, plural form of nouns, subject-verb agreement and tense. Based on Dulay, Burt and Krashen’s (1982) surface structure taxonomy, the main ways by which students modify the target forms are misinformation and omission, with addition of elements or misordering being less frequent. The results also showed an increase in grammatical accuracy in the students’ spoken English towards the end of the course