Machine-assisted translation of literary text
A case study
Antonio Toral | ADAPT Centre
Andy Way | School of Computing, Dublin City University
Contrary to perceived wisdom, we explore the role of machine translation (MT) in assisting with the translation of literary texts, considering both its limitations and its potential. Our motivations to explore this subject are twofold, arising from: (1) recent research advances in MT, and (2) the recent emergence of the ebook, which together allow us for the first time to build literature-specific MT systems by training statistical MT models on novels and their professional translations. A key challenge in literary translation is that one needs to preserve not only the meaning (as in other domains such as technical translation) but also the reading experience, so a literary translator needs to carefully select from the possible translation options. We explore the role of translation options in literary translation, especially in the context of the relatedness of the languages involved. We take Camus’ L’Étranger in the original French language and provide qualitative and quantitative analyses for its translations into English (a less-related language) and Italian (more closely related). Unsurprisingly, the MT output for Italian seems more straightforward to be post-edited. We also show that the performance of MT has improved over the last two years for this particular book, and that the applicability of MT does not only depend on the text to be translated but also on the type of translation that we are trying to produce. We then translate a novel from Spanish-to-Catalan with a literature-specific MT system. We assess the potential of this approach by discussing the translation quality of several representative passages.
Keywords: machine translation of literary text, human translation, literary translation, machine translation, statistical machine translation
Published online: 28 January 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.4.2.04tor
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.4.2.04tor
References
Bellos, David
Besacier, Laurent
2014 “Traduction automatisée d-une oeuvre littéraire: une étude pilote. In
Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN)
, Marseille, France. Accessed June 1, 2015. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01003944/document.
Brown, Peter, John Cocke, Stephen Della Pietra, Vincent Della Pietra, Fred Jelinek, John Lafferty, Robert Mercer, and Paul Roosin
Brown, Peter, Stephen Della Pietra, Vincent Della Pietra, and Robert Mercer
Fancellu, Federico, Morgan O’Brien, and Andy Way
Genzel, Dmitriy, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Franz Och
Graham, Yvette, Timothy Baldwin, Alistair Moffat, and Justin Zobel
Greene, Erica, Tugba Bodrumlu, and Kevin Knight
Hardmeier, Christian
Hearne, Mary, and Andy Way
Jones, Ruth, and Ann Irvine
Kelly, Nataly, and Jost Zetzsche
Li, Linlin, and Caroline Sporleder
Lønning, Jan T., Stephan Oepen, Dorothee Beermann, Lars Hellan, John Carroll, Helge Dyvik, Dan Flickinger, Janne Bondi Johannessen, Paul Meurer, Torbjørn Nordgård, Victoria Rosén, and Erik Velldal
2004 “LOGON. A Norwegian MT Effort. In
Proceedings of the Workshop in Recent Advances in Scandinavian Machine Translation
. Uppsala, Sweden. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/RASMAT/extended_abstracts/LOGON.pdf.
Meyer, Thomas
Nida, Eugene, and Charles Taber
O’Brien, Sharon
Och, Franz, and Hermann Ney
Papineni, Kishore, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei-Jing Zhu
Penkale, Sergio, and Andy Way
2013 “Tailor-made Quality-controlled Translation.
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 35
. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~away/PUBS/2013/Penkale_and_Way_ASLIB_2013.pdf.
Reyes, Antonio
Richardson, Stephen
2012 “Using the Microsoft Translator Hub at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed July 1, 2015. http://amta2012.amtaweb.org/AMTA2012Files/papers/Richardson.pdf.
Shutova, Ekaterina, Tony Veale, and Beata Klebanov
Snover, Matthew, Bonnie Dorr, Richard Schwartz, Linnea Micciulla, and Ralph Weischedel
2006 “A Study of Translation Error Rate with Targeted Human Annotation. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://lampsrv02.umiacs.umd.edu/pubs/TechReports/LAMP_126/LAMP_126.pdf.
Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way
2014 “Is Machine Translation Ready for Literature? Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.translatingandthecomputer.com/#!antonio-toral-1-abstractbio/cheb.
2015 “Translating Literary Text between Related Languages Using SMT.
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, NAACL
, Denver, Colorado, USA. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W15-0714. 
Varga, Dániel, László Németh, Péter Halácsy, Andrés Kornai, Viktor Trón, and Viktor Nagy
2005 “Parallel Corpora for Medium Density Languages.
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
, Borovets, Bulgaria. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.kornai.com/Papers/ranlp05parallel.pdf.
Voigt, Rob, and Dan Jurafsky
2012 “Towards a Literary Machine Translation: The Role of Referential Cohesion.
Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT 2012 Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature
, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Accessed July 1, 2015. http://stanford.edu/~jurafsky/voigtjurafsky12.pdf.
Way, Andy
2013 “Traditional and Emerging Use-Cases for Machine Translation.
Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 35
. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~away/PUBS/2013/Way_ASLIB_2013.pdf.
Cited by
Cited by 10 other publications
Almahasees, Zakaryia Mustafa
Castilho, Sheila
Guerberof-Arenas, Ana & Antonio Toral
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A.
King, Katherine M.
Lee, Changsoo
Mah, Seung-Hye
Slessor, Stephen
Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina
Toral, Antonio & Andy Way
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 november 2021. 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.