Cover not available
Part of
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
References
Baker, Mona
1993 “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications”. In: Text and Technology: In honour of John Sinclair. Ed. by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 233–252. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bendazzoli, Claudio, and Annalisa Sandrelli
2005 “An Approach to Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies: Developing EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus”. MuTra2005 – Challenges of Multidimensional Translation: Conference Proceedings.
Baroni, Marco, and Silvia Bernardini
2006 “A new approach to the study of Translationese: Machine-learning the difference between original and translated text”. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 21(3):259–274. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernardini, Silvia, Adriana Ferraresi and Maja Miličević
2016 “From EPIC to EPTIC – Exploring simplification in interpreting and translation from an intermodal perspective”. Target 28: 61–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernardini, Silvia, Adriana Ferraresi, Mariachiara Russo, Camille Collard and Bart Defrancq
2018 “Building Interpreting and Intermodal Corpora: A How-to for a Formidable Task”. In: Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies. Ed. by Mariachiara Russo, Claudio Bendazzoli and Bart Defrancq. Singapore: Springer. pp. 21–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chesterman, Andrew
2004 “Beyond the particular”. In: Translation Universals – Do they exist? Ed. by Mauren, Anna and Kujamäki, Pekka. Benjamins Translation Library, 48(vi): 224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crocker, Matthew, Vera Demberg and Elke Teich
2016 “Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (IDeaL)”. KI – Künstliche Intelligenz, 30(1): 77–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Defrancq, Bart
2015 “Corpus-based research into the presumed effects of short EVS”. In: Interpreting 17.1: 26–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania and Teich, Elke
2018 “Using relative entropy for detection and analysis of periods of diachronic linguistic change”. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, COLING 2018, Santa Fe, NM, USA.
Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania and Elke Teich
2019 “Toward an optimal code for communication: The case of scientific English”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2019 aop. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Sutter, Gert, Isabelle Delaere and Koen Plevoets
2012 “Lexical Lectometry in Corpus-Based Translation Studies. Combining Profile-Based Correspondence Analysis and Logistic Regression Modeling.” In: Quantitative Methods in Translation Studies. Ed. by Michael Oakes and Meng Ji, pp. 326–346. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fankhauser, Peter, Jörg Knappen and Elke Teich
2014 “Exploring and Visualizing Variation in Language Resources”. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14). Reykjavik, Iceland: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Gellerstam, Martin
1986 “Translationese in Swedish novels translated from English”. In: Translation Studies in Scandinavia: Proceedings from the Scandinavian Symposium on Translation Theory (SSOTT). Ed. by Lars Wollin and Hans Lindquist. Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, pp. 88–95.Google Scholar
Halverson, Sandra
2003 “The Cognitive Basis of Translation Universals.” Target 15(2): 197–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hareide, Lidun
2019 “Comparable parallel corpora: A critical review of current practices in corpus-based translation studies”. In: Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies. New resources and applications. Ed. by Doval, Irene and M. Teresa Sanchez Nieto. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 19–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hughes, James M., Nicholas J. Foti, David C. Krakauer and Daniel N. Rockmore
2012 “Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(20). 7682–7686. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jurafsky, D. and Martin, J. H.
2008 Speech and Language Processing: An introduction to speech recognition, computational linguistics and natural language processing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta
2012 “Interpreting universals and interpreting style”. PhD thesis. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.Google Scholar
Karakanta, Alina, Mihaela Vela and Elke Teich
2018 “Preserving Metadata from Parliamentary Debates”. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Miyazaki, Japan: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Klingenstein, Sara, Tim Hitchcock and Simon De Deo
2014 “The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(26). 9419–9424. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koehn, Philipp
2005 “Europarl: a parallel corpus for statistical machine translation”. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Machine Translation Summit. Phuket, Thailand: Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation, pp. 79–86.Google Scholar
Koppel, Moshe and Noam Ordan
2011 “Translationese and its dialects”, In: Proceedings of Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Portland, Oregon, pp. 1318–1326.Google Scholar
Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina and Marcos Zampieri
2018 “Linguistic features of genre and method variation in translation: a computational perspective”. In: The Grammar of Genres and Styles: From Discrete to Non-Discrete Units. Ed. by Dominique Legallois, Thierry Charnois, and Meri Larjavaara. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 92–117. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Monti, Cristina, Claudio Bendazzoli, Annalisa Sandrelli and Mariachiara Russo
2005 “Studying Directionality in Simultaneous Interpreting through an Electronic Corpus: EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus. Meta, 50 (4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Östling, Robert and Jörg Tiedemann
2017 “Continuous multilinguality with language vectors”. In: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers. Valencia, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 644–649. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rabinovich, Ella and Shuly Wintner
2015 “Unsupervised Identification of Translationese”. In: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 3: 419–432. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rubino, Raphael, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Josef van Genabith
2016 “Information Density and Quality Estimation Features as Translationese Indicators for Human Translation Classification”. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL). Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sandrelli, Annalisa and Claudio Bendazzoli
2005 “Lexical Patterns in Simultaneous Interpreting: A Preliminary Investigation of EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus)”. In: Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series 1. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham.Google Scholar
Shlesinger, Miriam and Noam Ordan
2012 “More spoken or more translated? Exploring a known unknown of simultaneous interpreting”. In: Target 24(1):43–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szymor, Nina
2018 “Translation: universals or cognition? A usage-based perspective”. In: Target 30(1):53–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teich, Elke
2003 Cross-linguistic Variation in System and Text: A Methodology for the Investigation of Translations and Comparable Texts. Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teich, Elke, José Martínez Martínez and Alina Karakanta
(2020) “Translation, information theory and cognition”. In: Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition. Ed. by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobson. London: Routledge, pp. 360–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zou, Will Y., Richard Socher, Daniel Cer and Christopher D. Manning
2013 “Bilingual Word Embeddings for Phrase-Based Machine Translation”. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Seattle, Washington, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1393–1398.Google Scholar