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Lecture 13 Translation and Terminology Lecture Notes

This document discusses translation and terminology. It covers: 1) Different types of translation environments including individual translators, small/large teams, and in-house teams. 2) Levels of computer assistance for translation ranging from machine translation (MT) where the translator supports the machine, to computer-assisted translation (CAT) where software supports the translator. 3) The role of terminology and terminologists in assisting translators to systematically record terminology for consistent use over time and languages.

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85 views

Lecture 13 Translation and Terminology Lecture Notes

This document discusses translation and terminology. It covers: 1) Different types of translation environments including individual translators, small/large teams, and in-house teams. 2) Levels of computer assistance for translation ranging from machine translation (MT) where the translator supports the machine, to computer-assisted translation (CAT) where software supports the translator. 3) The role of terminology and terminologists in assisting translators to systematically record terminology for consistent use over time and languages.

Uploaded by

IuLy IuLy
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lecture 14 Translation and terminology

 Typical translation environments


◦ Individual translators / freelance
◦ small teams
◦ Small /large teams (possibly in-house)
◦ Bi-/multi lingual

 Computer assistance for translation (criterion= levels of support provided to translators)


◦ Machine translation (MT) – the translator supports the machine
◦ Computer-assisted translation (CAT) – the computer program supports the translator
◦ Human translation
(Wright & Wright, 1997)
Translation:
 Machine translation (MT)
 Applicable mainly to texts with an appropriate degree of standardisation and coherence
 Texts must consist only of words contained in the computer’s dictionary
 Can be used for the pre-translation phase
 Can also be used for a “gisting translation“

Approaches to MT:
 Direct:
◦ the translation is based on large dictionaries and word-by-word translation with some
simple grammatical adjustments
◦ The translation unit of the approach is usually a word (based on lists of words)
◦ Ex. Systran - one of the oldest still used (1969)

 Interlingua (a language independent representation):


◦ translation is done via an intermediary (semantic) representation of the SL text
in two stages: from the SL to the interlingua (IL) and from the IL to the TL

 Knowledge based: follows the linguistic and computational instructions supplied by human
researchers in linguistics and programming
 corpus based (statistical or example-based)
 replaces traditional rule-based approaches
 computers can learn the translations of terminology from previously translated materials
 outputs are often ungrammatical
 Hybrid (also statistics-based)
 incorporates higher level abstract syntax rules
 it is difficult to merge the fundamentally different approaches
Recently:
 Neural Machine Translation (NMT) (Google) - an end-to-end learning approach for automated
translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based
translation systems.
 Introduced in 2016
 advantage - an ability to learn directly from input text to associated output text.
 Its architecture typically consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNNs), one to consume the
input text sequence and one to generate translated output text.
Three main uses:
 assists comprehension, gives quick access to information
 assists in the writing of texts
 assists in translation

Quality of MT depends:
 on the linguistics affinity between the SL and the TL
 on the quality of the Source document

Advantages
 Speed (time-effective)
 Keeps terminology uniform
 Useful for banking and retrieving terminology

Disadvantages
 Can be used only in limited subject areas
 Only for commercially viable languages, not for low-density languages.
 Needs intensive revision and post-editing
 increases costs
 reduces speed

Computer-assisted translation (CAT) = typically provide two databases, a Translation Memory (TM)
and a termbase (TDB).
A CAT system (Trados, déjà vu, MemSource, MemoQ etc.) provides assistance for the translator
 the software breaks the text to be translated into segments
 the translator validates the corresponding target text
 the software memorises the source segment and the target segment as being linguistic equivalents
 If the source segment appears in the text again, the software automatically proposes the
memorised translation.

Advantages
 Saves time
 Interactive
 Ensure consistency for team work
Disadvantages
 can only deal with a text simplistically in terms of linguistic segments
 training is necessary for efficient use
 time is necessary for the creation of an extensive database

Scope of ISO 12616.2 translation-oriented terminography (2002)


Translation-oriented terminography deals with:
◦ traditional terminology
◦ phraseology
◦ contexts
◦ names of institutions
◦ standard text segments
◦
What is the role of terminology / the terminologists?
Translators have always recorded terminological information for later use ...
Experience has shown terminology / terminography enables translators:
◦ to record and systematize terminology
◦ to use terminology consistently over time
◦ to deal more efficiently with several languages

 Human translation
The first stage in human translation is complete comprehension of the source language text. This
comprehension operates on several levels:
 Semantic level
 Syntactic level
 Pragmatic level

There are at least five types of knowledge used in the translation process of specialised texts:
 Linguistic
◦ of the source language
◦ of the target language
 of equivalents between the source and target languages
 of the subject field as well as general knowledge
 of socio-cultural aspects (source and target cultures)

Problems at each level


 linguistic
◦ Lack of terminology in either of the two languages
 Lack of terminology in the TL => secondary term-formation through:
Direct borrowing (no translation): ex. rom. mouse, soft, hard < eng. Mouse,
soft, hard
◦ Loan translation / calque: eng. Online > fr. en ligne
◦ Translation (literal)
◦ Translation (transposition): eng. hand knitted (noun + part) => tricotat
manual (part + adj)
◦ Translation (reformulation) (eng. Yellow pages, rom. Pagini aurii)
◦ Inflation of terminology in SL (other reasons than denominational needs,
ex. political correctness)
◦ Cultural differences to consider when establishing equivalents between the
source and target languages

Terminology and translators


50 years ago:
 Professional translators =
◦ Translators in the EC, UN, NATO and other international organizations
◦ Free-lancers – often with some other part-time job – with knowledge of languages
 Advantages
◦ creativity
◦ flexibility
 Disadvantges
◦ Lack of consistency
◦ Lack of accuracy
Now:
 Professional translators =
◦ Translators in the EC, UN, NATO and other international organizations (?)
◦ In-house translators (?)
 Language services companies
◦ Free-lancers – often employed by these companies + some other part-time job

Today, translator = language services provider

 The Language Services Provider:


◦ translates and interprets
◦ uses translation software
◦ uses information technology
◦ revises translations
◦ edits and adapts both originals and translations
◦ subtitles and dubs multimedia texts
◦ creates translation memories
◦ creates terminology databases within commercial translation software
◦ works with Controlled Writing and Machine Translation
◦ does research in Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering

Final question: Should we TRAIN translators / terminologists or EDUCATE them?

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