Keeping an eye on the UI design of Translation Memory: How do translators use the 'concordance' feature?

Motivation – To investigate the usefulness of sub- segment matching (Concordance feature) in a Translation Memory interface and translators' attitudes to new UI developments around such matching. Research approach – An explorative work-in- progress using eye tracking for translation conducted by professional translators, followed by an opinion survey. Findings/Design – The results suggest that the Concordance window is useful for checking terminology and context, but there is some evidence that the translators do not wish to have this feature turned on constantly. Research limitations/Implications – This is an initial work-in-progress study with a limited number of participants. Quantitative and qualitative results are presented. Originality/Value – This is the first empirical research of its kind. Translators are rarely, if ever, consulted about the UI of the tools they have to use. Take away message - The potential productivity and quality gain from sub-segment matches in Translation Memory is not fully realised and may be enhanced with improved UI design derived from focused research on user experience. Keywords Translation technology, Translation Memory (TM), user interface, sub-segment matching, concordance, eye tracking, user experienc

The Treatment of Geographical Dialect in Literary Translation from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

This paper discusses problems involved in the translation of literary works that apply linguistic varieties, especially geographical dialects. It surveys selected approaches to the functions of dialects in literature and to the strategies of dealing with linguistic variation in translation, arguing that the understanding of the issue may be deepened and systematized by applying notions drawn from relevance theory. The use of dialect in literary texts is interpreted as a communicative clue and the translators′ approach to its rendering is described with reference to the cognitive environment of the recipients and the balance of processing effort and communicative gain. Examples are drawn from the Polish translations of The Secret Garden by F.H. Burnett, the oldest coming from 1917 and the newest from 2012, which highlight the translators′ changing assumptions on the recipients′ cognitive environment reflected in the choice of the strategy of dialect rendition

Version System for Document Translations

V této bakalářské práci se zabýváme implementací verzovacího systému pro překlady dokumentů. Takový systém zaručuje konzistenci více instancí dokumentu v různých jazycích. Pomáhá řídit práci překladatelů zavedením verzí a recenzí. Implementujeme webovou aplikaci, která splňuje tyto požadavky pomocí webového aplikačního frameworku Django.In this bachelor's thesis, we are dealing with the implementation of a version control system for document translations. Such a system maintains the consistency of multiple instances of a document in different languages. It helps to manage translators' work by introducing versions and reviews. We implement the web application which meets these requirements using the Django framework

Investigating the readability of literary texts translations: A step towards formulating the ‘Nativity Hypothesis’

The present study aims at formulating a tentative hypothesis for the issue of ‘Nativity’. It focuses on the readability level of the translations by source-language native and target-language native translators. The corpus selected for analysis was the Persian Modern novella The Blind Owl. The original work was written by the most widely-known Persian short-story writer Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) and it was translated by Bashiri (the SL native translator) in 2016 and Costello (the TL native translator) in 1957. The corpus was investigated in terms of total word number, ‘Long Words’ number, ‘Hard Words,’ ‘Gunning Fog Index’ and ‘Lexical Density’ in order to give a clear picture of the readability of the two translations. One principle in favour of the tentative ‘Nativity Hypothesis’ was found to be that TL native translators produce a wider, more domesticated, more target-reader friendly, more fluent and more readable translation than SL native translators.’ The study was just a single and humble step towards formulating the NH. Prospective researchers are encouraged to conduct confirmatory research focusing on different text-types, such as classical literary texts, and sacred texts. A researcher working on such subjects would hopefully take a further step towards the formulation of a somehow reliable ‘Nativity Hypothesis.

Comparing translator acceptability of TM and SMT outputs

This paper reports on an initial study that aims to understand whether the acceptability of translation memory (TM) among translators when contrasted with machine translation (MT) unacceptability is based on users’ ability to optimise precision in match suggestions. Seven translators were asked to rate whether 60 English-German translated segments were a usable basis for a good target translation. 30 segments were from a domain-appropriate TM without a quality threshold being set, and 30 segments were translated by a general domain statistical MT system. Participants found the MT output more useful on average, with only TM fuzzy matches of over 90% considered more useful. This result suggests that, were the MT community able to provide an accurate quality threshold to users, they would consider MT to be the more useful technology

Chapter 2 Dutch literary translators’ use and perceived usefulness of technology

Ch 2 - In this chapter, we report on a survey conducted among literary translators working from or into Dutch. A total of 155 literary translators filled out the survey. Questions cover translators’ backgrounds and education, the types of technology they use (both general technology and technology specifically developed for translation), the types of translation technology they are aware of, and whether or not they feel these types of translation technology are (or can be) useful for literary translation. We verify whether date of birth, years of experience, and education have an impact on translators’ use of translation technology. We use thematic analysis based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to identify recurring topics and themes in respondents’ answers to open questions, outlining the reasons why they feel technology is or is not useful for literary translation, what the main limitations of current technology are, and which components they feel the ideal literary translation tool should include

Moving towards personalising translation technology

Technology has had an important impact on the work of translators and represents a shift in the boundaries of translation work over time. Improvements in machine translation have brought about further boundary shifts in some translation work and are likely to continue having an impact. Yet translators sometimes feel frustrated with the tools they use. This chapter looks to the field of personalisation in information technology and proposes that personalising translation technology may be a way of improving translator-computer interaction. Personalisation of translation technology is considered from the perspectives of context, user modelling, trust, motivation and well-being

Developing online parallel corpus-based processing tools for translation research and pedagogy

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2013.Abstract : This study describes the key steps in developing online parallel corpus-based tools for processing COPA-TRAD (copa-trad.ufsc.br), a parallel corpus compiled for translation research and pedagogy. The study draws on Fernandes s (2009) proposal for corpus compilation, which divides the compiling process into three main parts: corpus design, corpus building and corpus processing. This compiling process received contributions from the good development practices of Software Engineering, especially the ones advocated by Pressman (2011). The tools developed can, for example, assist in the investigation of certain types of texts and translational practices related to certain linguistic patterns such as collocations and semantic prosody. As a result of these applications, COPA-TRAD becomes a suitable tool for the investigation of empirical phenomena with a view to translation research and pedagogy.Este estudo descreve as principais etapas no desenvolvimento de ferramentas online com base em corpus para o processamento do COPA-TRAD (Corpus Paralelo de Tradução - www.copa-trad.ufsc.br), um corpus paralelo compilado para a pesquisa e ensino de tradução. Para a compilação do corpus, o estudo utiliza a proposta de Fernandes (2009) que divide o processo de compilação em três etapas principais: desenho do corpus, construção do corpus e processamento do corpus. Este processo de compilação recebeu contribuições das boas práticas de desenvolvimento fornecidas pela Engenharia de Software, especialmente as que foram sugeridas por Pressman (2011). As ferramentas desenvolvidas podem, por exemplo, auxiliar na investigação de certos tipos de textos, bem como em práticas tradutórias relacionadas a certos padrões linguísticos tais como colocações e prosódia semântica. Como resultado dessas aplicações, o COPA-TRAD configura-se em uma ferramenta útil para a investigação empírica de fenômenos tradutórios com vistas à pesquisa e ao ensino de tradução