Identifying universals of text translation*

Kanter, Ido; Kfir, Haggai; Malkiel, Brenda; Shlesinger, Miriam

doi:10.1080/09296170500500983

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In this spirit, it would be interesting to compare with results originating from text obtained through a machine translation, as recently studied in [59]. It is of huge interest to see whether a machine is more flexible with vocabulary and grammar than a human translator, -see also [60]! Finally, in summary, it is sufficient here to stress that punctuation marks are an essential part and a long lasting feature of indo-european languages, with a great variety of signs and in their use.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts

Ausloos

2010

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: Alice in wonderland and Through a looking glass. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log-log plots of the sentence length-rank relationship are presented for the major punctuation marks. Different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents. The exponent can take a value much less than unity (ca. 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. The texts are also mapped into time series based on the word frequencies. The quantitative differences between the original and translated texts are very minutes, at the exponent level. It is argued that sentences seem to be more reliable than word distributions in discussing an author style.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts

Ausloos

2010

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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“…In this spirit, it would be interesting to compare with results originating from text obtained through a machine translation, as recently studied in [84]. It is of huge interest to see whether a machine is more flexible with vocabulary and grammar than a human translator, -see also [43]! This paper results from the work of Mr. Jeremie Gillet, when an undergraduate student attending my lectures on fractals in 2006-2007.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(1) does not hold [20]. Whence still some question cannot be avoided on artificial languages, translations, and on effects resulting from automatic Table 2 Top ten most frequent words in AWL eng and AWL esp with their frequency or machine translations [43].…”

Section: Zipf Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Ausloos¹

2008

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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A comparison of two english texts from Lewis Carroll, one (Alice in wonderland), also translated into esperanto, the other (Through a looking glass) are discussed in order to observe whether natural and artificial languages significantly differ from each other. One dimensional time series like signals are constructed using only word frequencies (FTS) or word lengths (LTS). The data is studied through (i) a Zipf method for sorting out correlations in the FTS and (ii) a Grassberger-Procaccia (GP) technique based method for finding correlations in LTS. Features are compared : different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents for the ranking properties, and the phase space attractor dimensionality. The Zipf exponent can take values much less than unity (ca. 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. This non-universality is conjectured to be a measure of the author style. Moreover the attractor dimension r is a simple function of the so called phase space dimension n, i.e., r = n λ , with λ = 0.79. Such an exponent should also conjecture to be a measure of the author creativity. However, even though there are quantitative differences between the original english text and its esperanto translation, the qualitative differences are very minutes, indicating in this case a translation relatively well respecting, along our analysis lines, the content of the author writing.

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“…At least three recent studies use statistical and computational means to analyze computerized corpora in order to tell translations from originals, where different source and target languages were studied: Borin & Prütz 2000, Kanter et al 2006and Baroni & Bernardini 2006. All three point to fundamental differences between originals and translations, whether marked by different POS sequences (Borin & Prütz 2000), different ratios of shared and non-shared word types (Kanter et al 2006), or different sequences of words, POS tags, or both (Baroni & Bernardini 2006).…”

Section: Methodology: Studying Translated Vs Non-translated Textsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Translational conflicts between cognate languages: Arabic into Hebrew as case in point

Ordan¹,

Hershberg²,

Shlesinger³

2010

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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In this study we examine ten hypotheses related to stylistic features of two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic. Our assumption was that these hypotheses would enable us to discriminate texts written originally in Hebrew from those translated from Arabic. The ten hypotheses take into account a contrastive analytical view as well as recent research in Translation Studies. Being cognate languages, Hebrew and Arabic share morphological, phonetic and semantic features; consequently, certain Arabic forms trigger similar forms in Hebrew. We see this as accounting for the predominance of interference in the case of this (cognate) language pair and as evidence of an overarching hypothesis, whereby translation between cognate languages will entail interference, often superseding the norm of adherence to target-language standards. Eight of the ten hypotheses were borne out, to varying extents.

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Identifying universals of text translation*

Cited by 11 publications

References 10 publications

Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts

Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts

Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Translational conflicts between cognate languages: Arabic into Hebrew as case in point

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