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

Authors

  • Michael Carl Renmin University of China & Copenhagen Business School
  • Moritz Jonas Schaeffer Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v0i56.97201

Keywords:

translation, post-editing, non-literality, statistical machine translation

Abstract

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 non-literality.

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Published

2017-10-11

How to Cite

Carl, M., & Schaeffer, M. J. (2017). Why Translation Is Difficult: A Corpus-Based Study of Non-Literality in Post-Editing and From-Scratch Translation. HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, (56), 43–57. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v0i56.97201

Issue

No. 56 (2017)

Section

THEMATIC SECTION: Translation Technology Research in Translation Studies

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