European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Abstract
Invited talk delivered at Machine Translation Summit XIV 2-6 September 2013, Nice, France.Phraseological unit is an umbrella term which covers a wide range of multi-word units (collocations, idioms, proverbs, routine formulae, etc.). Phraseological units (PUs) are pervasive in all languages and exhibit a peculiar combinatorial nature. PUs are usually frequent, cognitively salient, syntactically frozen and/or semantically opaque. Besides, their creative manipulations in
discourse can be anything but predictable, straightforward or easy to process. And when it comes to translating, problems multiply exponentially. It goes without saying that cultural differences and linguistic anisomorphisms go hand in hand
with issues arising from varying degrees of equivalence at the levels of system and text. No wonder PUs have been considered a pain in the neck within the NLP community. This presentation will focus on contrastive and translational features of phraseological units. It will consist of three parts. As a convenient background, the first part will contrast two similar concepts: multi-word unit (the preferred term within the NLP community) versus phraseological unit (the preferred term in phraseology). The second part will deal with phraseological systems in general, their structure and functioning. Finally, the third part will adopt a contrastive approach, with especial reference to translators’ strategies, procedures and choices. For good or for bad, when it comes to rendering phraseological units, human translation and computer-assisted translation appear to share the same garden path
