wEBMT: developing and validating an example-based machine translation system using the world wide web

We have developed an example-based machine translation (EBMT) system that uses the World Wide Web for two different purposes: First, we populate the system’s memory with translations gathered from rule-based MT systems located on the Web. The source strings input to these systems were extracted automatically from an extremely small subset of the rule types in the Penn-II Treebank. In subsequent stages, the (source, target) translation pairs obtained are automatically transformed into a series of resources that render the translation process more successful. Despite the fact that the output from on-line MT systems is often faulty, we demonstrate in a number of experiments that when used to seed the memories of an EBMT system, they can in fact prove useful in generating translations of high quality in a robust fashion. In addition, we demonstrate the relative gain of EBMT in comparison to on-line systems. Second, despite the perception that the documents available on the Web are of questionable quality, we demonstrate in contrast that such resources are extremely useful in automatically postediting translation candidates proposed by our system

Translation Studies: in search for vigour and relevance

The discipline of Translation Studies emerged from the needs of society, and has tried to respond to its challenges. This article contains an overview of the development of Translation Studies, ranging from the normative, linguistic translation theories of the 1950’s to descriptive studies and communicative and pragmatic branches, e.g., the Skopos Theory and the Manipulation School), and also some totally non-linguistic branches of Translation Studies: the Ethics and Sociology of Translation. The article also deals with the relationship of Translation Studies with other fields of study, especially Contrastive and Applied Linguistics. It comes to the conclusion that Translation Studies constitutes a discipline in its own right – with theories and methods of its own and an object of study of its own. This includes the process of translation and interpretation, the products of this process, and the interrelations of translators and translations with society and culture.Peer reviewe

The World of Translation

Basically, transferring message from the source to target language is not just changing the language, as there is multidiscipline process in the translation. The complexity performed since the language is multi-system and its variety in communication is never apart from context. Therefore, the translation needs not only linguistics theory but also some other theories like socio-linguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, contrastive analysis and cross culture understanding

Cultural specification in translation: study of "The conference of the birds"

http://www.ester.ee/record=b4428921~S1*es

Informativity in Translation

توفر أنواع مختلفة من المؤشرات الهيكلية للمعلوماتية في اللغات، اعتمادا على كيفية وضع علامة على بنية معلومات الجملة في سياق معين. حقيقة أننا لا نجد فقط أن الوسائل الهيكلية المختلفة المستخدمة لتحقيق هيكل المعلومات عبر اللغات، ولكن أيضا في لغة واحدة بطريقة تفاعلية، ويثير العديد من الأسئلة المتعلقة بوصف هيكل المعلومات وإعماله. إن الإجابة الكاملة لن تشكل بالضرورة نظرية للعلاقة بين هيكل المعلومات وإمكانية تحقيقها. المسألة ليست فقط لتكون قادرة على وصف أن بنية المعلومات تتحقق عن طريق لحن أو ترتيب الكلمات، على سبيل المثال. إذا كان هيكل المعلومات يجب أن يكون جانبا عالميا من المعنى الحاسم، فإن النظرية يجب أن تكون قادرة على تفسير لماذا تستفيد لغة من مؤشرات هيكلية معينة من المعلوماتية، وعندما تفعل ذلك - من منظور لغوي. من وجهة نظر متعددة اللغات، والسؤال هو حول الطريقة التي نتوقع المؤشرات الهيكلية للمعلوماتية لغة معينة ربما تستخدم. سؤال آخر من وجهة نظر اللغة الداخلية، حول الطريقة التي يمكن أن تصف ليس فقط كيف يمكن أن تستخدم لغة على سبيل المثال. ترتيب كلمة أو لحن، ولكن أيضا التنبؤ عندما لغة سوف تفعل ذلك. للقيام بذلك، يجب علينا أن نوضح: كيف يقرر الناس كم تشكل المعرفة وحدة وكم لتحميل على شكل السطح. وتتكون أزواج الأسئلة والأجوبة، أو تسلسل البيان، التعليق من الكلام الذي تكون طبيعته نصية بالكامل وذات جزئية فقط. كما لاحظ Blackburn and Boss (2003:34) ان الموضوعات ليست عبارات في الجمل، ولكن عناصر المعرفة المستخدمة من قبل الناس.The fact that we not only find that different structural means used to realize information structure across languages, but also within a single language in an interactive fashion, gives rise to several questions concerning the description of information structure and its realization. A complete answer would not necessarily constitute a theory of the relation between information structure and its possible realization. The issue is not just to be able to describe that information structure is realized by tune or word order, for example. If information structure is to be a universal aspect of sentential meaning, then a theory should be able to explain why a language may avail itself of particular structural indications of informativity, and when it would do so - from a cross-linguistic perspective

Jakobson: Translation as imputed similarity

Jakobson, in his essays, has tried to insert Peirce’s typology of signs (icon, index, symbol) in his own binary logic, in which every feature of a text may be considered or dismissed either with a 0 or with a 1 (absent, present). In so doing, he used the features “similarity versus contiguity” and “imputed versus factual”, and discovered that the notion of “imputed similarity” was not covered by Peirce’s triad. Hence the search for it. In this article, whose ideological basis and quotations are mostly from Jakobson’s essays, the author tries to show that the notion of “translation” may be the missing link. Starting from Peirce’s main triad, and its initial incomprehension among Western scholars influenced by Saussure, the interpretant is then viewed as the subjective, affective component of sign and its interpretation. Syntax, considered in Peircean and Jakobsonian terms, is iconic. The evolution of meaning, characterizing all communication, is possible thanks to construction and thanks to metaphoric and metonymic connections. In the last part of the article, cultural implications of communication — and translation — are considered

SIMPLE MALAY TO ENGLISH TRANSLATOR

In the modern world, there is an increased need for language translation. Attempts of language translation are as old as computer themselves. Machine translation is the attempt to automate all, or part of the process of translating from one human language to another language. Machine Translation involves translating from a source natural language to a target language. Machine Translation is hard because structures in one human language often do not correspond in a simple way to structures in another. This paper represents a prototype of a Simple Malay to English Translator. This translator is developed to translate simple Malay sentence to English sentence since there is not many Malay-English translator available. The main tools that will be used for the project development are Java Language, Forte for Java 4.0 Community Edition and Microsoft Notepad version 5.1. From the research done, a dictionary that is used for a machine translator is usually being created in a notepad file for easy retrieval compared to using Microsoft Access of other database application. The ambiguity problem would not be addressed in this project. Hence, the goal of the project is to translate syntactically correct and the semantic factor is not taken into consideration

Dictionary-based Data Generation for Fine-Tuning Bert for Adverbial Paraphrasing Tasks

Recent advances in natural language processing technology have led to the emergence of large and deep pre-trained neural networks. The use and focus of these networks are on transfer learning. More specifically, retraining or fine-tuning such pre-trained networks to achieve state of the art performance in a variety of challenging natural language processing/understanding (NLP/NLU) tasks. In this thesis, we focus on identifying paraphrases at the sentence level using the network Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). It is well understood that in deep learning the volume and quality of training data is a determining factor of performance. The objective of this thesis is to develop a methodology for algorithmic generation of high-quality training data for paraphrasing task, an important NLU task, as well as the evaluation of the resulting training data on fine-tuning BERT to identify paraphrases. Here we will focus on elementary adverbial paraphrases, but the methodology extends to the general case. In this work, training data for adverbial paraphrasing was generated utilizing an Oxfordiii synonym dictionary, and we used the generated data to re-train BERT for the paraphrasing task with strong results, achieving a validation accuracy of 96.875%

Target Text Contraction in English-into-Korean Translations: A Contradiction of Presumed Translation Universals?

This paper contradicts the prevailing assumptions among the advocates of translation universals (TU’s) that explicitation, a translation behavior which consists of spelling things out rather than leaving them implicit in translation, is a potential TU, irrespective of the specific language pairs involved in the process of translation. Specifically, via a study employing a newly built 517,609-word parallel corpus, it is shown that implicitation and the subsequent TT contraction as well as explicitation and TT expansion entailed were both observed in translations involving Korean and English. The significance of the direction of language combinations in translations employing the same language pair was identified, together with the introduction and verification of the validity of the four measurement units devised for this study to capture diverse aspects of explicitation/implicitation which in turn entail TT expansion/contraction.Cet article contredit l’hypothèse qui a cours parmi les partisans des universels de traduction selon laquelle l’explicitation, procédé consistant à expliquer clairement les choses plutôt que de les laisser implicites dans le texte traduit, est un universel de traduction (UT) potentiel quelles que soient les deux langues présentes dans le processus de traduction. Au moyen de l’étude d’un nouveau corpus parallèle de 517 609 mots, on a notamment observé aussi bien l’implicitation et la contraction du texte d’arrivée qui l’accompagne que l’explicitation et l’expansion du texte traduit que cela implique dans des traductions entre le coréen et l’anglais. On a constaté que la direction des combinaisons linguistiques dans les traductions employant les mêmes langues est significative et on a introduit et vérifié la validité des quatre unités de mesure conçues pour que cette étude saisisse les différents aspects de l’explicitation/implicitation et de l’expansion/contraction du texte traduit qui en découlent.본 논문은 원문 텍스트에 암묵적으로 나타나있는 의미를 ’번역 과정에서 언어적으로 구현하여 의미의 명확성을 제고하는 번역 현상을 가리키는 ’외연화‘가번역언어에 상관없이 나타나는 ’번역보편소‘ 후보라는 ’번역보편소‘ 주창자들의 가설을 실증적 자료분석을 통해 반박한다. 구체적으로는 한국어와 영어 간의 번역 텍스트에서는 외연화와 그에 따른 번역텍스트 확장현상 이외에 원문텍스트에 명시적으로 구현되어 있는 의미를 암묵적 추론이 가능한 방식으로 구성하는 ’내포화‘와 그로 인한 번역텍스트 축소현상도 관찰되고 있음을 보고한다. 연구방법론으로 본 연구를 위해 새로 구성된 517,609 단어(토큰기준)의 병렬코퍼스를 다양한 통계기법을 사용, 분석한다. 이를 통해 동일 언어 쌍이 번역언어로 사용되는 경우에도 언어별 번역방향(한영및영한)이 연구대상인 번역현상에 중요한 차이를 가져온다는 사실을 보고하는 한편, 외연화/암묵화와 그로 인한 번역텍스트 확장/축소의 다양한 측면을 포착하기 위해 고안된 네 가지 측정단위의 타당성을 입증한다

Sketch of a Noisy Channel Model for the translation process

To advance the state of the art in translation process research, Toury (2004) requests the formulation of ``probabilistic explanations in translation studies''. This chapter develops these ``conditioned statements'' into a Noisy Channel Model of the translation process with the ultimate aim to predict ``particular modes of behavior'' by their observable traces in the user activity data (UAD). We first develop a Noisy Channel Model for the translation process and then present a number of research results that may serve as a basis for the formulation of observable behavioral units and of the latent states in a noisy translation process model. However, a large amount of research has still to be conducted before we might be able to get a complete picture of the various shades and complexities of the translation process