La enseñanza de la traducción especializada. Corpus textuales de traductores en formación con etiquetado de errores

This paper describes the method used in teaching specialised translation in the English Language Translation Master’s programme at Masaryk University. After a brief description of the courses, the focus shifts to translation learner corpora (TLC) compiled in the new Hypal interface, which can be integrated in Moodle. Student translations are automatically aligned (with possible adjustments), PoS (part-of-speech) tagged, and manually error-tagged. Personal student reports based on error statistics for individual translations to show students’ progress throughout the term or during their studies in the four-semester programme can be easily generated. Using the data from the pilot run of the new software, the paper concludes with the first results of the research examining a learner corpus of translations from Czech into English.En el presente trabajo se describe el método que se ha seguido para enseñar traducción especializada en el Máster de Traducción en Lengua Inglesa que se imparte en la Universidad de Masaryk. Tras una breve descripción de las asignaturas, nos centramos en corpus textuales de traductores en formación (translation learner corpora, TLC) recopilado en la nueva interfaz Hypal, que se puede incorporar en Moodle. Las traducciones realizadas por los alumnos se alinean de forma automática (con posibles modificaciones) y reciben un etiquetado gramatical y un etiquetado manual de errores. Es posible generar de manera sencilla informes sobre los alumnos con información estadística sobre errores en las traducciones individuales para mostrar su progreso durante el cuatrimestre o el programa completo. En función de los datos obtenidos en la prueba piloto del nuevo software, este trabajo presenta los primeros resultados del estudio a través de un corpus de traducciones de aprendices del checo al inglés

Teaching Specialized Translation Error-tagged Translation Learner Corpora

This paper describes the method used in teaching specialised translation in the English Language Translation Master’s programme at Masaryk University. After a brief description of the courses, the focus shifts to translation learner corpora (TLC) compiled in the new Hypal interface, which can be integrated in Moodle. Student translations are automatically aligned (with possible adjustments), PoS (part-of-speech) tagged, and manually error-tagged. Personal student reports based on error statistics for individual translations to show students’progress throughout the term or during their studies in the four-semester programme can be easily generated. Using the data from the pilot run of the new software, the paper concludes with the first results of the research examining a learner corpus of translations from Czech into English.Článek popisuje metodu používanou při výuce odborného překladu v magisterském studijním programu Překladatelství anglického jazyka na Masarykově univerzitě. Po krátkém popisu kurzů se zaměřuje na korpus překladů studentů (TLC) sestavený v novém rozhraní programu Hypal, které lze integrovat do systému Moodle. Studentské překlady jsou automaticky zarovnány (s možnými úpravami), označkovány podle slovního druhu a nakonec jsou ručně označeny chyby. Program umožňuje sledovat práci jednotlivých studentů pomocí statistik chyb pro jednotlivé překlady v průběhu semestru nebo během studia ve čtyřsemestrovém programu. Na závěr jsou v článku uvedena data z pilotního běhu nového softwaru s prvními výsledky výzkumu korpusu překladů z češtiny do angličtiny

Comparing collocations in translated and learner language

This paper compares use of collocations by Italian learners writing in and translating into English, conceptualising the two tasks as different modes of constrained language production and adopting Halverson’s (2017) Revised Gravitational Pull hypothesis as a theoretical model. A particular focus is placed on identifying a method for comparing datasets containing translations and essays, assembled opportunistically and varying in size and structure. The study shows that lexical association scores for dependency-defined word pairs are significantly higher in translations than essays. A qualitative analysis of a subset of collocations shared and unique to either mode shows that the former set features more collocations with direct cross-linguistic links (connectivity), and that the source/first language seems to affect both modes similarly. We tentatively conclude that second/target language salience effects are more visible in translation than second language use, while connectivity and source language salience affect both modes of bilingual processing similarly, regardless of the mediation variable

Legal translation training through online corpus-based resources

En esta contribución presentamos una experiencia docente basada en la traducción especializada (inglés-español), más concretamente en la traducción de géneros jurídicos. La novedad de esta propuesta consiste en el uso de recursos abiertos en línea basados en la me-todología de corpus durante el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje (Suau-Jiménez & Ramírez Polo, 2010; Olvera-Lobo & Gutiérrez-Artacho, 2011; Sánchez Ramos, 2021). Es decir, herramientas que, de manera autónoma y flexible, permitan al estudiante llevar a cabo tareas de pretraducción tales como el análisis del género textual y su macroestructura, reflexiones sobre aspectos traductológicos y terminológicos, la búsqueda de textos paralelos o la consulta enci-clopédica (Borja, Juste, Ordóñez & Conde, 2014; Molés-Cases, Juste, Saiz-Hontangas & Borja, 2017), entre otras. Dado que, en general, los estudiantes no son usuarios de este tipo de recur-sos y, de entrada, su uso les resulta complejo, nuestro objetivo es, por un lado, dar a conocer y utilizar de forma exploratoria una serie de herramientas en línea que contribuyan a la reflexión sobre el proceso traductor y al fomento de la competencia traductora (por ejemplo, programas de análisis de corpus como AntConc, Anthony, 2017a, 2017b; o extractores terminológicos como Dexter, Periñán-Pascual, 2017). Por otro lado, pretendemos que resulte un instrumento útil para la didáctica de la traducción jurídica basada en la metodología de corpus (Espunya, 2014; Sánchez Ramos & Vigier Moreno, 2016), y el análisis de géneros y sus convenciones (Borja, 2000, 2007), extrapolable a otras asignaturas y especialidades.In this contribution we present a teaching experience based on specialized translation (English-Spanish), specifically on the translation of legal genres. The novelty of this proposal lies in the use of open online resources within a corpus-based methodology during the teaching-learning process (Suau-Jiménez & Ramírez Polo, 2010; Olvera-Lobo & Gutiérrez-Artacho, 2011; Sánchez Ramos, 2021). In other words, tools that, in an autonomous and flexible manner allow students to carry out pre-translation tasks such as analysis of the textual genre and its macrostructure, reflections on traductology and terminological aspects, the search for parallel texts or encyclopaedic consultation (Borja, Juste, Ordóñez & Conde, 2014; Molés-Cases, Juste, Saiz-Hontangas & Borja, 2017), among others. Given that students are not generally users of this type of resources and their use is complex, our aim is, on the one hand, to introduce and make exploratory use of a series of online tools that contribute to the reflection on the transla-tion process and to the promotion of translation competence (for example, corpus analysis pro-grammes such as AntConc, Anthony, 2017a, 2017b; or terminology extractors such as Dexter, Periñán-Pascual, 2017). On the other hand, we intend it to be a profitable tool for the teaching of legal translation founded on the corpus-based methodology (Espunya, 2014; Sánchez Ramos & Vigier Moreno, 2016) and on the analysis of genres and their conventions (Borja, 2000, 2007), which can be extrapolated to other subjects and specialities

Translationese indicators for human translation quality estimation (based on English-to-Russian translation of mass-media texts)

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Human translation quality estimation is a relatively new and challenging area of research, because human translation quality is notoriously more subtle and subjective than machine translation, which attracts much more attention and effort of the research community. At the same time, human translation is routinely assessed by education and certification institutions, as well as at translation competitions. Do the quality labels and scores generated from real-life quality judgments align well with objective properties of translations? This thesis puts this question to a test using machine learning methods. Conceptually, this research is built around a hypothesis that linguistic properties characteristic of translations, as a specific form of communication, can correlate with translation quality. This assumption is often made in translation studies but has never been put to a rigorous empirical test. Exploring translationese features in a quality estimation task can help identify quality-related trends in translational behaviour and provide data-driven insights into professionalism to improve training. Using translationese for quality estimation fits well with the concept of quality in translation studies, because it is essentially a document-level property. Linguistically-motivated translationese features are also more interpretable than popular distributed representations and can explain linguistic differences between quality categories in human translation. We investigated (i) an extended set of Universal Dependencies-based morphosyntactic features as well as two lexical feature sets capturing (ii) collocational properties of translations, and (iii) ratios of vocabulary items in various frequency bands along with entropy scores from n-gram models. To compare the performance of our feature sets in translationese classifications and in quality estimation tasks against other representations, the experiments were also run on tf-idf features, QuEst++ features and on contextualised embeddings from a range of pre-trained language models, including the state-of-the-art multilingual solution for machine translation quality estimation. Our major focus was on document-level prediction, however, where the labels and features allowed, the experiments were extended to the sentence level. The corpus used in this research includes English-to-Russian parallel subcorpora of student and professional translations of mass-media texts, and a register-comparable corpus of non-translations in the target language. Quality labels for various subsets of student translations come from a number of real-life settings: translation competitions, graded student translations, error annotations and direct assessment. We overview approaches to benchmarking quality in translation and provide a detailed description of our own annotation experiments. Of the three proposed translationese feature sets, morphosyntactic features, returned the best results on all tasks. In many settings they were secondary only to contextualised embeddings. At the same time, performance on various representations was contingent on the type of quality captured by quality labels/scores. Using the outcomes of machine learning experiments and feature analysis, we established that translationese properties of translations were not equality reflected by various labels and scores. For example, professionalism was much less related to translationese than expected. Labels from documentlevel holistic assessment demonstrated maximum support for our hypothesis: lower-ranking translations clearly exhibited more translationese. They bore more traces of mechanical translational behaviours associated with following source language patterns whenever possible, which led to the inflated frequencies of analytical passives, modal predicates, verbal forms, especially copula verbs and verbs in the finite form. As expected, lower-ranking translations were more repetitive and had longer, more complex sentences. Higher-ranking translations were indicative of greater skill in recognising and counteracting translationese tendencies. For document-level holistic labels as an approach to capture quality, translationese indicators might provide a valuable contribution to an effective quality estimation pipeline. However, error-based scores, and especially scores from sentence-level direct assessment, proved to be much less correlated by translationese and fluency issues, in general. This was confirmed by relatively low regression results across all representations that had access only to the target language side of the dataset, by feature analysis and by correlation between error-based scores and scores from direct assessment

La interdisciplinariedad en los Estudios de Traducción y su manifestación en el contexto de la formación de traductores: diseño del corpus VERIFID para el estudio terminológico de la descripción de la oferta formativa pública del Grado en Traducción e Interpretación en España

Programa de Doctorado en Lenguas Modernas, Traducción y Español como Lengua ExtranjeraEste estudio propone, en primer lugar, analizar el concepto de la interdisciplinariedad (ID), contextualizado en el ámbito de la Educación Superior. A partir de este análisis, examinaremos este fenómeno en sus diferentes manifestaciones en los Estudios de Traducción, esto es, en los planos epistemológico, investigador y profesional, que quedarán debidamente definidos y que configuran los ejes o contextos de análisis. Tomando como base las conclusiones de la revisión teórica, agrupada en los dos primeros bloques de la investigación, el trabajo se plantea detectar y analizar las marcas de ID en el ámbito de la formación en Traducción e Interpretación, concretamente en la descripción de su oferta formativa pública recogida en las memorias de verificación de la ANECA (Verifica) de los títulos de Grado en TI en España. Por otra parte, y al hilo de los objetivos que nos planteamos, hemos creado un corpus ad hoc (DOBTI) que se deriva de VERIFID, para completar el análisis de la ID en los instrumentos impulsados desde Bolonia, concretamente las titulaciones conjuntas. En vista de la escasez de trabajos que aborden los programas conjuntos en TI en España (que adoptan la forma de dobles grados en la actualidad) (Morón 2013) y de la necesidad de contribuir al conocimiento de esta oferta formativa que crece cada año, aspiramos a elaborar un mapa del catálogo de dobles titulaciones (DT) en TI en España.Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla. Departamento de Filología y TraducciónPostprin

Building the Arabic Learner Corpus and a System for Arabic Error Annotation

Recent developments in learner corpora have highlighted the growing role they play in some linguistic and computational research areas such as language teaching and natural language processing. However, there is a lack of a well-designed Arabic learner corpus that can be used for studies in the aforementioned research areas. This thesis aims to introduce a detailed and original methodology for developing a new learner corpus. This methodology which represents the major contribution of the thesis includes a combination of resources, proposed standards and tools developed for the Arabic Learner Corpus project. The resources include the Arabic Learner Corpus, which is the largest learner corpus for Arabic based on systematic design criteria. The resources also include the Error Tagset of Arabic that was designed for annotating errors in Arabic covering 29 types of errors under five broad categories. The Guide on Design Criteria for Learner Corpus is an example of the proposed standards which was created based on a review of previous work. It focuses on 11 aspects of corpus design criteria. The tools include the Computer-aided Error Annotation Tool for Arabic that provides some functions facilitating error annotation such as the smart-selection function and the auto-tagging function. Additionally, the tools include the ALC Search Tool that is developed to enable searching the ALC and downloading the source files based on a number of determinants. The project was successfully able to recruit 992 people including language learners, data collectors, evaluators, annotators and collaborators from more than 30 educational institutions in Saudi Arabia and the UK. The data of the Arabic Learner Corpus was used in a number of projects for different purposes including error detection and correction, native language identification, Arabic analysers evaluation, applied linguistics studies and data-driven Arabic learning. The use of the ALC highlights the extent to which it is important to develop this project

Epistemological Approaches to Legal Translation Education: A Situated Account

La tesi doctoral que ací es presenta planteja, mitjançant una metodologia de caire quantitativo-qualitativa, una visió en conjunt de la didàctica de la traducció jurídica en Espanya, amb èmfasi en la pedagogia de l’aula i la metodologia emprada pel cos docent universitari. Partint de la conceptualització del coneixement mateix i l'adquisició de coneixement per part dels aprenents, el treball que presentem considera les bases epistemològiques que apuntalen l’educació superior en Espanya i les emmarca en un context institucional determinat (l’Espai Europeu d’Educació Superior, l’EEES), i un context normatiu concret (la Llei orgànica de 2007 per què es modifica la Llei Orgànica 6/2001, d’Universitats, LOMLOU), per tal de, en última instància, reflexionar sobre la praxi i la metodologia docent contemporània, la seua legitimació des de la filosofia de l’educació i l’epistemologia i com el canvi de paradigma que proposa l’EEES ha evidenciat la necessitat de re-enfocar l’ensenyament de la traducció jurídica.Through a mixed quantitative/qualitative standpoint, this doctoral dissertation provides a situated depiction of the current methodological and pedagogic practices regarding legal translation education in Spain. Framing education in epistemological terms, the dissertation reflects on the conceptualisation of knowledge and knowledge acquisition as tenets underpinning higher education methodology. This way, legal translation education is characterised according to a number of the institutional premises within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the relevant domestic regulatory framework (the Spanish 2007 Organic Law modifying the Spanish University Law 6/2001, LOMLOU). Ultimately, this work reflects on the contemporary teaching praxis and classroom methodology of lecturers, the legitimation of the mainstream pedagogic practices in philosophical and epistemological terms, and how a substantial change of paradigm within EHEA has witnessed the need to re-shape and re-focus legal translation education.Programa de Doctorat en Llengües Aplicades, Literatura i Traducci

Specialized Lexicography, terminology and reference tools

Ce numéro spécial de Lingue & Linguaggi s’interroge sur certains aspects théoriques et pratiques concernant les termes appartenant aux domaines de l’économie et du droit et notamment sur leur inclusion dans des ressources monolingues ou bilingues consultées par des usagers experts et non experts, selon une pluralité d’approches théoriques et méthodologiques. À côté de l’aspect domanial économique ou juridique, les questions théoriques qui tissent un fil rouge entre les différents articles concernent les aspects suivants: la réflexion autour de la définition des termes; le support que les corpus peuvent fournir à une représentation du sens tenant compte des objectifs spécifiques des usagers ciblés par les ressources elles-mêmes; l’utilité de la terminologie en tant qu’instrument cognitif apte à la structuration et à la dénomination de nouvelles idées dans des domaines spécialisés; les avantages ou les désavantages apportés par la facilité et la rapidité d’accès aux nombreuses ressources sur la Toile de la part du public – expert, semi expert ou profane