Translation ambiguity in and out of context

Prior, Anat; Wintner, Shuly; MacWhinney, Brian; Lavie, Alon

doi:10.1017/s0142716410000305

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Previous research (Anari & Ghaffarof, 2013;Baker, 2011;Blum-Kulka,1986Catford, 1965;Chesterman, 1989;Colina, 1997;Coulson, 2000;Gutt, 1990Gutt, , 2010Hatim & Mason, 1990;Holmes, 1988Holmes, , 2004Honig, 1997;House, 1997;Jakoboson, 1967;Levinson, 1983;Mossop, 2007;Newmark, 1981;Nida, 1964;Prior et al, 2011;Segler et al, 2002;Suberviola & Mendez, 2002;Vinay& Darbelnet, 1958;Wilss,1996) indicated that the relationship between linguistics and translation is centered ijel.ccsenet.org Vol. 6, No.…”

Section: Functional Linguistics and Translation Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Potential solutions for the problem of assessing the quality of translation point to the application of functional linguistic approaches, which are based on textual analysis of source and target texts. Previous research (Anari & Ghaffarof, 2013;Angelelli, 2009;Bowker, 2000;Brione, 2007;Butler & McMunn, 2014;Doyle, 2003;Drugan, 2013;Honig, 1997;Hatim & Mason;Prior et al, 2011; indicated that the application of assessment research-based criteria resulted in improving the quality of translation. Furthermore, research on the relationship between linguistics and the evaluation of translation (Colina, 2003;Drugan, 2013;Gambier & Doorslaer, 2011;Gouadec, 2010;Kim, 2006;Lauscher, 2000;Martinez-Melis & Hurtado, 2001;Mossop, 2007;Neubert, 2000;Pym, 2003;Reiss, 2000;Saldanha & O'Brien, 2014;Schaffner, 1998) concluded that providing an objective assessment tool prior to the process of translation enabled in understanding the concept of quality in relation to valid criteria.…”

Section: Purpose Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, translation quality was divided into two major categories for assessment purposes: accuracy and clarity. Parallel to such studies, Prior et al (2011), conducted a research to compare translations of single words, made in a laboratory setting, with contextualized translation of the same words, made by professional translators, and concluded that translation choices in both cases showed that decontextualized translation reflected the bilinguals' prior experience. Similarly, Honig's (1997), investigation of the theoretical foundations and practical application of TQA, emphasized the impact of linguistic functional approaches on training to improve the quality of translation.…”

Section: International Journal Of English Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Application of Functional Linguistic Models for Assessing Quality of Translation: A Descriptive Analytical Study

Madkour

2016

IJEL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This descriptive analytical study aimed at examining the application of linguistic-based functional approaches in assessing the quality of translation. A number of translation quality assessment models were analyzed to investigate the potential of integrating linguistic theories into translation theories. The problem that the present study tackled was that institutions of translation at higher education, translation organizations, and agencies of translation worldwide face difficulties in evaluating the quality of translation. Using objective criteria, which are based on the variables of quality, is still debated among these shareholders. The rationale of the present study is that adopting functional linguistic approaches can help in understanding the components of the quality of translation in terms of the relationship between translation purposes and functional adequacy. Linguistic functional approaches can determine the relationship between textual adequacy, and translation quality of content. Therefore, the current study followed a nonlinear design, which allowed an intensive description and analysis of three functional models applied in Translation Quality Assessment (TQA), and their effectiveness in assessing the quality of translation. Corpus data was collected from the theories and original works of House, Nord, and Colina, on translation quality assessment. Problems related to discourse analysis, function of the language, text typology, and theories of equivalence were examined. Translation criticism and evaluation including the classification of the functional hierarchy of translation, standards and benchmarks, empirical evidence for the success and limitations of the linguistic functionalist approaches in translation assessment, and competences and performances in translation, were thoroughly investigated. The research recommendations of the current study emphasize a number of issues relevant to translation evaluation. These issues are: (a) the significance of integrating the linguistic functional approaches into the curriculum of translation; (b) the importance of defining the components of solid criteria that can be employed for evaluating the quality of translations; and (c) the necessity of providing an empirical tool that can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of translated works. As such, this research study is a contribution in the field of translation evaluation and criticism as it provides a number of models that can be implemented in translation classrooms or in translation organizations. This study also provides an evaluation matrix, based on the models of TQA that can help translators understand the requirements of translation quality prior to the translation process itself. This research is also among the first studies to illustrate how to implement linguistic functional approaches that can be adopted by translation organizations, academic institutions, and publishing houses, to evaluate professional translations and this will inevitably lead to raising the standards of translati...

show abstract

Section: Functional Linguistics and Translation Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Purpose Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: International Journal Of English Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Application of Functional Linguistic Models for Assessing Quality of Translation: A Descriptive Analytical Study

Madkour

2016

IJEL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Participants were slower and less accurate to respond to words that had more than one translation compared to unambiguous words. Prior et al (2011) compared single-word de-contextualized translation choices made by bilingual speakers of English and Spanish with contextualized translation alternatives, extracted from translations that were created by professional translators. Prior et al (2011: 98) assumed that translation forms which "are most frequently appropriate in contextual real life translation should also be the strongest in translation out of context".…”

Section: Priming Studies and Literal Translation Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Translation Is Difficult: A Corpus-Based Study of Non-Literality in Post-Editing and From-Scratch Translation

Carl

Schaeffer

2017

HJLCB

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper develops a definition of translation literality that is based on the syntactic and semantic similarity of the source and the target texts. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that absolute literal translations are easy to produce. Based on a multilingual corpus of alternative translations we investigate the effects of cross-lingual syntactic and semantic distance on translation production times and find that non-literality makes from-scratch translation and post-editing difficult. We show that statistical machine translation systems encounter even more difficulties with nonliterality.

show abstract

“…Several factors pertaining to the source language as well as the target language have been discussed as potential causes of translation ambiguity (see e.g., Prior, Wintner, MacWhinney, & Lavie, 2011). First, and most relevant to the current investigation, semantic ambiguity in the source language may lead to the existence of multiple translations, because each meaning is likely to receive a different translation in a different language (Frenck-Mestre & Prince, 1997; but see Degani & Tokowicz, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Determinants of translation ambiguity

Degani

Prior

Eddington

et al. 2016

LAB

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ambiguity in translation is highly prevalent, and has consequences for second-language learning and for bilingual lexical processing. To better understand this phenomenon, the current study compared the determinants of translation ambiguity across four sets of translation norms from English to Spanish, Dutch, German and Hebrew. The number of translations an English word received was correlated across these different languages, and was also correlated with the number of senses the word has in English, demonstrating that translation ambiguity is partially determined by within-language semantic ambiguity. For semantically-ambiguous English words, the probability of the different translations in Spanish and Hebrew was predicted by the meaning-dominance structure in English, beyond the influence of other lexical and semantic factors, for bilinguals translating from their L1, and translating from their L2. These findings are consistent with models postulating direct access to meaning from L2 words for moderately-proficient bilinguals.

show abstract

Translation ambiguity in and out of context

Cited by 26 publications

References 30 publications

The Application of Functional Linguistic Models for Assessing Quality of Translation: A Descriptive Analytical Study

The Application of Functional Linguistic Models for Assessing Quality of Translation: A Descriptive Analytical Study

Why Translation Is Difficult: A Corpus-Based Study of Non-Literality in Post-Editing and From-Scratch Translation

Determinants of translation ambiguity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About