Anwendbarkeit der ISO 17100 auf intralinguales Übersetzen in Leichte und Einfache Sprache

Nach dem aktuellen Stand des Behindertengleichstellungsgesetzes (BGG, 2018) sollen Kommunikationen in Leichter und Einfacher Sprache zuganglich gemacht werden. Diese Tatigkeiten sind im Bereich der intralingualen Ubersetzung angesiedelt, die ihrerseits Teil der kommunikativen Barrierefreiheit sind. Es stellt sich mithin die Frage, inwiefern Instrumente und Prozesse der Qualitatssicherung und -optimierung, wie sie sich fur die interlinguale Ubersetzung bewahrt haben, auf die intralinguale Ubersetzung in Leichte und Einfache Sprache anwenden lassen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag gehen wir dieser Frage insbesondere mit Blick auf die ISO 17100 nach, die den Standard fur Ubersetzungsdienstleister defi…

Exploiting the Incomparability of Comparable Corpora for Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies

For empirical research in translation studies and contrastive linguistics comparability across languages is an important and non-trivial issue, particularly, if we aim at quantifying differences and commonalities. We approach this problem by investigating the CroCo Corpus of English and German originals and translations in eight different registers concentrating on the (in)comparability of the different subcorpora. They are comparable across languages but incomparable in terms of functional, i.e. register, variation. A feature matrix is analysed to reveal differences and commonalities between the bilingually comparable texts (i.e. English and German originals) and the monolingually comparab…

Acquisition of Generic Competencies Through Project Simulation in Translation Studies

Motivated by the research in several international and interdisciplinary initiatives, for example, P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning or the Collegiate Learning Assessment instruments, we seek for a scalable and measureable set of generic competencies for translation studies. Up to now, the acquisition of competencies in translation studies has primarily been operationalized by implementing authentic projects in higher education classes using socio-constructivist approaches. This results in a hybridization of subject-specific competencies and generic competencies in translator education. Because of the necessity to focus on the acquisition of generic competencies as a primary learnin…

Comparing the Quality of Neural Machine Translation and Professional Post-Editing

This empirical corpus study explores the quality of neural machine translations (NMT) and their post-edits (NMTPE) at the German Department of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) by evaluating NMT outputs, NMTPE, and respective revisions (REV) with the automatic error annotation tool Hjerson (Popovic 2011) and the more fine-grained manual MQM framework (Lommel 2014). Results show that quality assurance measures by post-editors and revisors at the DGT are most often necessary for lexical errors. More specifically, if post-editors correct mistranslations, terminology or stylistic errors in an NMT sentence, revisors are likely to correct the same type of error i…

Adapting and Validating the Collegiate Learning Assessment to Measure Generic Academic Skills of Students in Germany: Implications for International Assessment Studies in Higher Education

Starting in 2015, a German research team from the program Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHs), in collaboration with the US Council for Aid to Education (CAE), adapted and validated the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) for the German language and cultural context to measure generic higher-order cognitive skills of university students and graduates in Germany. In this chapter, the conceptual and methodological background, the framework of the adaptation and validation study, as well as preliminary results are presented. Finally, findings are discussed critically, and future challenges and perspectives are explored.

‘Monitoring’ in translation

Abstract We assume that visual feedback from the written trace during translation plays an important role in monitoring the emerging translation. In this study, 44 participants translated with and without visual feedback from the target text (TT). Numerous measures were used to explore the differences between the texts that were created in the two conditions and the characteristics of the task performance in the two conditions. The impact of ST-TT semantic and syntactic relationships showed that there were differences on two of three behavioural measures across conditions. In the comparison of features of the translation process, findings show that ST reading times were longer without visua…

Cognitive Effort and Efficiency in Translation Revision

Empirical studies of revision are often based on either think aloud protocols, interviews, or observational methods. Eye tracking and keylogging methods are rarely applied to the study of revision behavior. The authors employ established methods from translation process research (TPR) to study the eye movement and typing behavior during self-revision (i.e., the phase in the translation process that follows a first complete draft). The authors measure the effect of behavior during the drafting phase on the relative revision duration. Relative revision duration is the time translators spend revising the first complete draft of the source text. They find that the most efficient process involve…

Predictive Turn in Translation Studies: Review and Prospects

Translation: The Basics, written by Juliane House

Verstehen und Verständlichkeit von populärwissenschaftlichen Texten: Das Projekt PopSci – Understanding Science

Die offentliche Akzeptanz und Wirkung natur- und technikwissenschaftlicher Forschung hangt grundlegend davon ab, ob sich die Ziele und Forschungsergebnisse an die Offentlichkeit vermitteln lassen. Doch die Inhalte aktueller Forschungsvorhaben sind fur ein Laienpublikum oft nur schwer zuganglich und verstandlich. Vor dem Hintergrund, die gesellschaftliche Diskussion natur- und technikwissenschaftlicher Forschung zu verbessern, untersuchen und bewerten wir im Projekt PopSci – Understanding Science einen wichtigen Sektor des popularwissenschaftlichen Diskurses in Deutschland empirisch. Hierfur identifizieren wir die linguistischen Merkmale deutscher popularwissenschaftlicher Texte durch korpus…

The Translation and Interpreting Competence Questionnaire: an online tool for research on translators and interpreters

Despite the growth of research on translation and interpreting, measures of competence in such activities typically stem from informal, non-validated instruments. This scenario casts doubts on the ...

Cohesive explicitness and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus

Explicitness or implicitness as assumed properties of translated texts and other texts in multilingual communication have for some time been the object of speculation and, at a later stage, of more systematic research in linguistics and translation studies. This paper undertakes an investigation of explicitness/implicitness and related phenomena of translated texts on the level of cohesion. A corpus-based research architecture, embedded in an empirical research methodology, will be outlined, and first results and possible explanations will be discussed. The paper starts with a terminological clarification of the concepts of ‘explicitness’ and ‘explicitation’ in terms of dependent variables …

Training the modern translator – the acquisition of digital competencies through blended learning

This paper presents the ERASMUS+ DigiLing project, which aims to teach and improve linguists’ and translators’ skills and knowledge of digitalisation to prepare them for today’s job market. Against this background, it discusses the development of digital competencies and distinguishes them from traditional domain-specific and general competencies. For the purpose of competence acquisition, six online courses have been created which all revolve around the field of ‘digital linguistics’, including localization in the digital age and post-editing machine translation. We provide an overview of the project, the course contents and the didactic methodology. In addition, we discuss which competenc…

Eye-tracking revision processes of translation students and professional translators

Great effort has been made to define and to measure revision competence in translation. However, combined eye tracking and keylogging have hardly been applied in revision research. We believe it is...

An Intralingual Parallel Corpus of Translations into German Easy Language (Geasy Corpus): What Sentence Alignments Can Tell Us About Translation Strategies in Intralingual Translation

Parallel corpora are traditionally interlingual and contain source and target texts in different languages. However, intralingual translations into Easy Language (EL) become more and more common in various countries. First intralingual corpora have been built up and investigated in terms of linguistic and structural features, but a translation-driven corpus linguistic approach is still missing to empirically describe the strategies of Easy Language translation, the characteristics of translated texts as well as to make these parallel corpora usable for professionalising and automatising translation processes. In this paper, we introduce an intralingual parallel corpus of translations into G…

The Neural Basis of Idea Density During Natural Spoken Language

Idea density (ID) evolved as a quantification of propositional base structure. Besides its function as a measure of linguistic complexity, ID has also been used as an index of general linguistic ability. In order to find the neural basis for the processing of high or low ID during spontaneous speech, a sample of healthy adults was assessed using the functional resonance imaging (fMRI) technique; participants described pictures presented to them while in the scanner. Differential patterns of activation were observed for the low- and high-ID conditions, providing new insights into the processing correlates of ID.

Towards a methodological toolset for the psycholinguistics of translation

Abstract The manuscript provides readers with a basic methodological toolset for experimental psycholinguistic studies on translation. Following a description of key methodological concepts and the rationale behind experimental designs in psycholinguistics, we discuss experimental paradigms adopted from bilingualism research, which potentially constitute a methodological foundation for studies investigating the psycholinguistics of translation. Specifically, we show that priming paradigms possess several inherent advantages which make them particularly suitable for research on translation. The manuscript critically discusses key methodological problems associated with such paradigms and ill…