Cover not available
Part of
Border Crossings: Translation Studies and other disciplines
Edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer
[Benjamins Translation Library 126] 2016
► pp. 225–244

Computational linguistics and translation studies

Methods and models

ORCID logo | National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
 | Interactions Corp.
ORCID logo | University of Mainz
Translation process research is an active interdisciplinary research area within translation studies attracting translation scholars, computer scientists and the machine learning community alike. Novel data acquisition methods have been developed in recent years leading to large sets of translation process data that is analysed qualitatively as well as quantitatively. What has been anticipated already decades ago, today, computational linguistics methods are instrumental for translation process research and translation studies to enhance machine translation technologies by analysing real human behaviour. Empirical translation process research thus becomes more formalized and interconnected with computational linguistics methods and may potentially give answers to questions raised long time ago. In this chapter we trace the development of computational linguistics and translation process research from this angle and point to developments that we think will further drive this vibrant field of research.
Keywords: history of machine translation, predictive translation modelling, translation data analytics, translation process research
Published online: 14 September 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.126.11car
References (81)
References
Alves, Fabio. (ed). 2003. Triangulating Translation. Perspectives in Process Oriented Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alves, Fabio and Gonçalves, J.L.V.R. 2003. “A relevance theory approach to the investigation of inferential processes in translation”. In Alves, F., 2003: 3–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alves, Fabio and Daniel C. Vale . 2009. “Probing the unit of translation in time: aspects of the design and development of a web application for storing, annotating, and querying translation process data”. Across Languages and Cultures 10 (2): 251–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, John. 2007. How can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aziz, Wilker, Maarit Koponen and Lucia Specia. 2014. “Sub-sentence Level Analysis of Machine Translation Post-editing Effort”. In Sharon O’Brien, Laura Winther Balling, Michael Carl, Michel Simard and Lucia Specia (eds). Post-editing of Machine Translation: Processes and Applications, 170–200. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Bangalore, Srinivas, Bergljot Behrens, Michael Carl, Maheshwar Ghankot, Arndt Heilmann, Jean Nitzke, Moritz Schaeffer and Annegret Sturm. 2016. “Syntactic Variance and Priming Effects in Translation” In Michael Carl, Srinivas Bangalore and Moritz Schaeffer (eds) New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research: Exploring the CRITT TPR-DB. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan and Kaplan, Ron. 1985. The mental representation of grammatical relations. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Buchweitz, Augusto and Fabio Alves. 2006. “Cognitive adaptation in translation: an interface between language direction, time, and recursiveness in target text production”. Letras de Hoje 41 (4): 241–272.Google Scholar
Butt, Miriam, Stefanie Dipper, Anette Frank, and Tracy Holloway King. 2002. “Writing Large-scale Parallel Grammars for English, French, and German”. In Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (eds), Proceedings of the LFG99 Conference. Stanford: CSLI publications. Available from: [URL]Google Scholar
Carl, Michael. 2010. “A computational framework for a cognitive model of human translation processes”. Translating and the Computer 32, 18–19 November, London; 19 pages. ([URL]).Google Scholar
. 2012. “Translog-II: a Program for Recording User Activity Data for Empirical Reading and Writing Research”. In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation , European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Istanbul, Turkey, [URL]
Carl, Michael and Barbara Dragsted. 2012. “Inside the Monitor Model: Processes of Default and Challenged Translation Production”. TC3: Translation, Computation, Corpora, Cognition, vol. 2 (1), 127–145.Google Scholar
Carl, Michael and Martin Kay. 2011. “Gazing and Typing Activities during Translation: A Comparative Study of Translation Units of Professional and Student Translators.” Meta 56 (4): 952–975. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carl, Michael and Moritz Schaeffer. (forthcoming). “Models of the translation process”. In John W. Schwieter & Aline Ferreira (eds). The Handbook of Translation and Cognition. Wiley-Blackwell.
Carl, Michael, Dragsted, Barbara and Lykke Jakobsen, Arnt. 2011. ”A Taxonomy of Human Translation Styles”. 01 June 2011. [URL].
Carl, Michael, Silke Gutermuth and Silvia Hansen-Schirra. 2014. Post-editing machine translation: Efficiency, strategies, and revision processes in professional translation settings. In Ferreira, Aline and John W. Schwieter (eds). Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting, 145–174. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carl Michael, Martin Kay, Kristian Tangsgaard and Hvelplund Jensen. 2010. “Long Distance Revisions in Drafting and Post-editing”. Paper presented at CICLing-2010 , Iaşi, Romania.
Catford, John C. 1965. A linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chesterman, Andrew. 2004. “Beyond the particular.” In A. Mauranen & P. Kujamäki (Eds.), Translation Universals: Do they Exist? 33–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
Daems, Joke, Michael Carl, Sonia Vandepitte, Robert Hartsuiker, Lieve Macken. 2016. “The effectiveness of consulting external resources during translation and post-editing of general text types”. In Michael Carl, Srinivas Bangalore and Moritz Schaeffer (eds) New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research: Exploring the CRITT TPR-DB, 111–135. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Groot, A.M.B. 1992. “Determinants of Word Translation.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18 (5), 1001–1018. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Denver, Louise. 2007. “Translating the implicit: on the inferencing and transfer of semantic relations”. In Yves Gambier, Miriam Shlesinger and Radegundis Stolze (eds). Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies: Selected contributions from the EST Congress. Lisbon 2004, 223–236 Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dragsted, Barbara. 2004. Segmentation in Translation and Translation Memory Systems. An Empirical Investigation of Cognitive Segmentation and Effects of Integrating a TM System into the Translation Process. Ph.D. thesis, Samfundslitteratur, Copenhagen. Ph.D. series, no. 5, vol. 2004.Google Scholar
. 2005. “Segmentation in translation: differences across levels of expertise and difficulty”. Target 17 (1): 49–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. “Coordination of Reading and Writing Processes in Translation: An Eye on Uncharted Territory”. In M. Schreve and E. Angelone (eds) Translation and Cognition, 41–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series; Nr. XV). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flickinger, Dan, Ann Copestake and Ivan A. Sag. 2000. “HPSG Analysis of English”. In W. Wahlster and R. Karger (eds.). Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation, 254–263. Berlin Heidelberg/New York: Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald, Klein, Ewan, Pullum, Geoffrey and Sag, Ivan. 1985. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Gile, Daniel. 1995/2009. Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Göpferich, Susanne. 2009. “Towards a model of translation competence and its acquisition: the longitudinal study TransComp”. In Susanne Göpferich, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Inger M. Mees (eds). Behind the Mind: Methods, models and results in translation process research. 11–37. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Halverson, Sandra. 2003. “The cognitive basis of translation universals.” Target 2 (15): 197–241.Google Scholar
. 2010. “Towards a cognitive theory of translation.” In L. Zybatow (Ed.), Translation studies: state of the art and perspectives. VI Ringvorlesung zur translationswissenschaft, 15–34. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Hansen, Gyde. 2006. “Retrospection methods in translator training and translation research”. JoSTrans. 2–41.Google Scholar
Hartsuiker, Robert J., Martin J. Pickering, and Eline Veltkamp. 2004. “Is Syntax Separate or Shared between Languages? Cross-linguistic Syntactic Priming in Spanish-English Bilinguals.” Psychological Science 15 (6): 409–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hutchins, John. 2005. “Example-based machine translation: a review and commentary”. Machine Translation 19 (3–4): 197–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hvelplund, Kristian Tangsgaard. 2011. Allocation of cognitive resources in translation. An eye-tracking and key-logging study. PhD thesis. Copenhagen Business School.Google Scholar
Ivir, Vladimir. 1981. “Formal Correspondence Vs. Translation Equivalence Revisited.” Poetics Today 2 (4): 51–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke. 1999. “Logging target text production with Translog”. In Gyde Hansen (ed). Probing the process in translation: Methods and results, 9–20. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
. 2003. Effects of think aloud on translation speed, revision and segmentation. In Fabio Alves (ed), Triangulating Translation: Perspectives in process oriented research, 69–95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2005. “Instances of peak performance in translation”. Lebende Sprachen 50 (3): 111–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. “Research Methods in Translation: Translog. Computer Keystroke Logging and Writing: Methods and Applications”. In Eva Lindgren; Kirk P.H. Sullivan (eds) Computer Keystroke Logging and Writing: Methods and Applications, 95–105. Oxford: Pergamon Press (Studies in Writing, Vol. 18).Google Scholar
. 2011. “Tracking Translators’ Keystrokes and Eye Movements with Translog.” In Cecilia Alvstad, Adelina Hild, Elisabeth Tiselius (eds): Methods and Strategies of Process Research, 37–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke, Kristian Tangsgaard H. Jensen and Inger M. Mees. 2007. ”Comparing modalities: idioms as a case in point”. In Franz Pöchhacker, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Inger M. Mees (eds). Interpreting studies and beyond: A tribute to Miriam Shlesinger, 217–249. Copenhagen: SamfundslitteraturGoogle Scholar
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke and Lasse Schou. 1999. ”Translog documentation”. In Gyde Hansen (ed.) Probing the process in translation: Methods and results, Appendix 1, 1–36. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Jarvella, Robert, Astrid Jensen, Elisabeth Halskov Jensen and Mette Skovgaard Andersen. 2002. “Towards characterizing translator expertise, knowledge and know-how: some findings using TAP and experimental methods”. In A. Riccardi (ed). Translation Studies. Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, 172–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jensen, Kristian Tangsgaard H. 2009. “Shifts in source text and target text attention during translation”. Paper given at the IATIS conference , Monash University 8–10 July 2009, Melbourne, Australia.
Jensen, Kristian Tangsgaard H., Annette C. Sjørup, and Laura W. Balling. 2009. “Effects of L1 Syntax on L2 Translation.” In Fabio Alves, Susanne Göpferich, and Inger M. Mees (eds), Methodology, Technology and Innovation in Translation Process Research: A Tribute to Arnt Lykke Jakobsen, 319–336. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Joshi, Aravind. 1985. “Tree Adjoining Grammars: How much context sensitivity is required to provide a reasonable structural description”. In D. Dowty and I. Karttunen and A. Zwicky (eds), Natural Language Parsing, 206–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koehn, Philipp, Hieu Hoang, Alexandra Birch, Chris Callison-Burch, Marcello Federico, Nicola Bertoldi, Brooke Cowan, Wade Shen, Christine Moran, Richard Zens, Chris Dyer, Ondrej Bojar, Alexandra Constantin, Evan Herbst. 2007. “Moses: Open Source Toolkit for statistical Machine Translation”. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), demonstration session , Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. DOI logo
Krings, Hans Peter. 1986. ”Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht. Psycholinguistische Grundlagen der Übersetzungsdidaktik“. In: Kühlwein, W. (Hrsg.). Neue Entwicklungen der Angewandten Linguistik, 52–56. Kongreßbeiträge zur 15. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik GAL. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar 1. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lorenzo, María Pilar. 1999. ”Apuntes para una discusión sobre métodos de estudio del proceso de traducción”. In Gyde Hansen (ed). Probing the process in translation: methods and results. 21–42. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Läubli, Samuel. 2014. Statistical Modelling of Human Translation Processes. Unpublished Master Thesis in Science Artificial Intelligence, School of Informatics University of EdinburghGoogle Scholar
Lörscher, Wolfgang. 1991. Translation Performance, Translation Process, and Translation Strategies. A Psycholinguistic Investigation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
Magalhães, Celia and Fabio Alves. 2006. “Investigando o papel do monitoramento cognitivo-discursivo e da meta-reflexão na formação de tradutores”. Cadernos de Tradução 17 (2): 71–128.Google Scholar
Malkiel, Brenda. 2006. “The effect of translator training on interference and difficulty”. Target 18 (2): 337–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Mitchell, Beatrice Santorini and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. “Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Tree-bank”, Computational Linguistics 19 (2): 313–330.Google Scholar
Muñoz Martín, Ricardo. 2006. “Expertise and environment in translation”. Paper presented at the Second IATIS Conference, Intervention in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Encounters , hosted by the University of the Western Cape in South Africa (11–14 July 2006).
Martínez-Gómez, Pascual, Akshay Minocha, Jin Huang, Michael Carl, Srinivas Bangalore and Akiko Aizawa. 2014. “Recognition of Translator Expertise using Sequences of Fixations and Keystrokes”. In Qvarfordt, P. and Hansen, D.W. (eds). Proceedings of Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, 299–302. New York, USA: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nagao, Makoto. 1984. “A framework of a mechanical translation between Japanese and English by analogy principle”. In A. Elithorn and R. Banerji (eds). Artificial and Human Intelligence, 173–180. Elsevier Science Publishers.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Sharon. 2006. “Pauses as indicators of cognitive effort in post-editing Machine Translation output”. Across Languages and Cultures 7 (1): 1–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Och, Franz Josef and Herman Ney. 2002. Dsicriminative training and maximum entropy models for statistical machine translation. In ACL’02 Proceedings of the 40 th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics , 295–302.
Pollard, Carl and Sag, Ivan, 1994. Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994.Google Scholar
Rydning Fougner, Antin. 2002. ”Pénétrer la boîte noire du traducteur”. Linguistica Antverpiensia 1: 273–285.Google Scholar
Saikh, Tanik, Srinivas Bangalore, Michael Carl and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay. 2015. “Predicting Source Gaze Fixation Duration: A Machine Learning Approach” Proceedings of the Conference on Cognitive Computing and Information Processing (CCIP) 2015, 3–4 March 2015. Noida: IEEE.
Satoshi, Shao and Nagao Makoto. 1990. Toward Memory-based Translation. In COLING90, volume 3, 247–252. Google Scholar
Schaeffer, Moritz and Michael Carl. 2013. “Shared representations and the translation process A recursive model”. In Ehrensberger-Dow, Maureen, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Séverine Hubscher-Davidson and Ulf Norberg (eds). Describing Cognitive Processes in Translation: Acts and events. Special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 8 (2): 169–190Google Scholar
. 2014. “Measuring the Cognitive Effort of Literal Translation Processes”. In Ulrich Germann, Michael Carl, Philipp Koehn, Germán Sanchis-Trilles, Francisco Casacuberta, Robin Hill and Sharon O’Brien (eds.). Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Humans and Computer-assisted Translation, Gothenburg, Sweden, Association for Computational Linguistics, 29–37, [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schaeffer, Moritz, Barbara Dragsted, Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund, Laura Winther Balling, Michael Carl. 2016. “Word translation entropy: evidence of early target language activation during reading for translation”. In Carl, Michael; Bangalore, Srinivas and Schaeffer, Moritz (Eds.). New Directions in Empirical Translation Process Research. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Singla, Karan, Ashleigh Gonzales, David Orrego Carmona, Srinivas Bangalore, Michael Carl. 2014. “Predicting Post-Editor Profiles from the Translation Process”. In Francisco Casacuberta, Marcello Federico and Philipp Koehn (eds). Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive and Adaptive Machine Translation, AMTA Workshop, Vancouver, Canada: AMTA.Google Scholar
Sjørup, Annette C. 2008. “Metaphor comprehension in translation: methodological issues in a pilot study”. In Susanne Göpferich, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Inger M Mees (eds). Looking at Eyes. Eye-Tracking Studies of Reading and Translation Processing, 53–77. Copenhagen: SamfundslitteraturGoogle Scholar
Sjørup, Annette C., Kristian Tangsgaard H. Jensen and Laura W. Balling. 2009. Syntactic processing in translation from L1 to L2. Eye-to-IT conference on translation processes, 28–29 April 2009. Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Somers, Harold. 1999. “Review article: example-based machine translation”. Machine Translation 14 (2), 113–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steedman, Mark, 1987. “Combinatory Grammars and Parasitic Gaps”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 5(3): 403–439. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. 2005. “The monitor model revisited: evidence from process research”. Meta 50 (2): 405–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja, Jukka Mäkisalo and Sini Immonen. 2008. “The translation process: interplay between literal rendering and a search for sense”. Across Languages and Cultures 9 (1): 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toury, Gideon. 1995/2012. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wahlster, Wolfgang (ed.) 2000. Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weaver, Warren. 1949. Translation. In Locke, W.N., Booth, D.A. (eds). 1955. Translation (PDF). Machine Translation of Languages. Cambridge: Massachusetts: MIT Press, 15–23. Available from: [URL]Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Fakhar, Mahdieh, Monica Vilhelm & Paz Díez-Arcón
2025. Introduction. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Mellinger, Christopher D.
2022. Quantitative questions on big data in translation studies. Meta 67:1 ► pp. 217 ff. DOI logo
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina
2019. Ethical issues regarding machine(-assisted) translation of literary texts. Perspectives 27:5 ► pp. 689 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.