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Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations
Edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
[Benjamins Translation Library 158] 2021
► pp. 307–323

Chapter 12
Exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models

ORCID logo | Fondazione Bruno Kessler / University of Trento
 | Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
ORCID logo | Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University
While some authors have suggested that translationese fingerprints are universal, others have shown that there is a fair amount of variation among translations due to source language shining through, translation type or translation mode. In our work, we attempt to gain empirical insights into variation in translation, focusing here on translation mode (translation vs. interpreting). Our goal is to discover features of translationese and interpretese that distinguish translated and interpreted output from comparable original text/speech as well as from each other at different linguistic levels. We use relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence) and visualization with word clouds. Our analysis shows differences in typical words between originals vs. non-originals as well as between translation modes both at lexical and grammatical levels.
Keywords: translationese, interpretese, relative entropy, language models, parallel corpora, comparable corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus data
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Probabilistic language models and analysis of translation variation
    • 3.2Comparing language models by relative entropy
  • 4.Analysis and results
    • 4.1Translation direction: Originals vs. Translation/Interpreting
    • 4.2Translation mode: Translation vs. Interpreting
  • 5.Summary and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.12kar
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