6533b825fe1ef96bd12831f7
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Why Translation Is Difficult
Michael CarlMoritz Schaeffersubject
Linguistics and LanguageTranslationStatistical machine translationMachine translationComputer science02 engineering and technologycomputer.software_genreMachine translation software usability050105 experimental psychologyLanguage and LinguisticsExample-based machine translationRule-based machine translation0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineeringPost-editing0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesDynamic and formal equivalencebusiness.industryCommunication05 social sciencesTransfer-based machine translationLinguisticsNon-literalityComputer-assisted translation020201 artificial intelligence & image processingSynchronous context-free grammarArtificial intelligencebusinesscomputerNatural language processingdescription
The paper develops a definition of translation literality that is based on the syntactic and semantic similarity of the source and the target texts. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that absolute literal translations are easy to produce. Based on a multilingual corpus of alternative translations we investigate the effects of cross-lingual syntactic and semantic distance on translation production times and find that non-literality makes from-scratch translation and post-editing difficult. We show that statistical machine translation systems encounter even more difficulties with non-literality.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-10-11 | Hermes |