Source language classification of indirect translations

Ilmari Ivaska and Laura Ivaska
University of Turku | Finnish Literature Society (SKS)
Abstract

One of the major barriers to the systematic study of indirect translation – that is, translations of translations – is the lack of efficient methods to identify these translations. In this article, we use supervised machine learning to examine whether computers can be harnessed to identify indirect translations. Our data consist of a monolingual comparable corpus that includes (1) nontranslated Finnish texts, (2) direct translations from English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish into Finnish, and (3) indirect translations from Greek (the ultimate source language) via English, French, German, and Swedish (mediating languages) into Finnish. We use n-grams of various types and lengths as feature sets and random forests as the statistical classification technique. To maximize the transferability of the method, the feature sets were implemented in accordance with the Universal Dependencies framework. This study confirms that computers can distinguish between translated and nontranslated Finnish, as well as between Finnish translations made from different source languages. Regarding indirect translations, the ultimate source language has a greater impact on the linguistic composition of indirect Finnish translations than their respective mediating languages. Hence, the indirect translations could not be reliably identified. Therefore, our results suggest that the reliable computational identification of indirect translations and their mediating languages requires a way to control for the effect of the ultimate source language.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 16 January 2021

Date accepted: 16 July 2021

Published online: 11 April 2022

Table of contents

In this article, we study indirect translation (ITr), which, put simply, is translating from translation(s). For example, the Finnish translation Kerro minulle, Zorbas ‘Tell me, Zorbas’ (1954b), by Vappu Roos, of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Βίος και πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά Vios kai politeía tou Aléxi Zormpá (1946, published in Carl Wildman’s English translation under the title Zorba the Greek [1952]) was not done from the original Greek but from the French translation by Yvonne Gauthier, Gisèle Prassinos, and Pierre Fridas, titled Alexis Zorba (1954a). In this case, ITr forms the chain Greek–French–Finnish, where Greek is the ultimate source language (ultimate SL), French is the mediating language, and Finnish is the ultimate target language (ultimate TL). An ITr may also be compilative, that is, based on several source texts (STs) in one or several SLs. For example, the Finnish translation Veljesviha ‘Hatred of brothers’ (1967), by Kyllikki Villa, of Kazantzakis’s novel Οι Αδερφοφάδες Oi aderfofádes (1963, published in Athena Gianakas Dallas’s English translation as The Fratricides [1964]) has three STs: the French translation (Les frères ennemis ‘The enemy brothers’, 1965, translated by Pierre Aellig), the English translation, and the Greek version (for more details, see L. Ivaska [2021]; for discussion on further types of ITrs, see, e.g., Washbourne 2013; Assis Rosa, Pięta, and Bueno Maia 2017).

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