Studying the human translation process through the TransSearch log-files (original) (raw)
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Translation analysis and translation automation
1993
We argue that the concept of translatio n analysis provides a suitable foundation for a new generation of translation support tools. We show that pre-existing translations ca n be analyzed into a structured translatio n memory and describe our TransSearch bilingual concordancing system, which allow s translators to harness such a memory. We claim that translation analyzers can help detect translation errors in draft translation s and we present the results of an experiment on the detection of deceptive cognates conducted as part of our TransCheck project . Finally, we claim that translation analysis ca n facilitate the speech-to-text transcription o f dictated translations and introduce our new TransTalk project .
2009
This paper presents a technology and a representation for gathering and analysing User Activity Data (UAD) from human translation sessions. We discuss recent advances in the field of translation process research and investigate how insights from this branch of research could be instrumentalised for the design translation tools. New technologies and novel ways of using existing technology could emerge with enhanced knowledge about translator's behaviour and a tight integration of human and machine translation models.
TransSearch: What are translators looking for
18th Conference of the …, 2008
Notwithstanding machine translation's impressive progress over the last decade, many translators remain convinced that the output of even the best MT systems is not sufficient to facilitate the production of publication-quality texts. To increase their productivity they turn instead to translator support tools. We examine the use of one such tool: TransSearch, an online bilingual concordancer. From the millions of requests stored in the system's logs over a 6-year period, we extracted and analyzed the most frequently submitted queries, in an effort to characterize the kinds of problems for which translators turn to this system for help. What we discover, somewhat surprisingly, is that our system seems particularly well-suited to help translate highly polysemous adverbials and prepositional phrases.
Towards statistical modelling of translators' activity data
The paper discusses recent advances in human translation process research and presents a methodology for gathering and analysing translators' activity data. We compare three translations of an English text into Danish. A coherent representation of the User Activity Data and a query formalism is suggested for retrieving source-target language alignment units and for tracing and interpreting the process data for these units. We look at a number of correction patterns and a fixation pause in more detail. With a better and more formalised way of understanding the underlying human processes, new technologies and novel ways of using existing technology could emerge that tighten the integration of speech recognition and automated translation aids into the translation workflow.
Modelling Human Translator Behaviour with Us er-Activity Data
suggests to model machine translation as an imitation of a process that can be observed in human translation behavior. However, not much work has been done in an MT context that looks into human translation processes. This paper seeks to introduce a research method for the investigation of human translation behavior based on User-Activity Data (UAD) which consists of the translator's recorded keystroke and eye-movement behavior and which can be replayed and analysed off-line. The paper gives the background of this technique and an example on a English-to-Danish translation. Our goal is to elaborate and investigate cognitively grounded basic translation concepts which are materialized and traceable in the UAD.
TransSearch: from a bilingual concordancer to a translation finder
2010
As basic as bilingual concordancers may appear, they are some of the most widely used computer-assisted translation tools among professional translators. Nevertheless, they still do not benefit from recent breakthroughs in machine translation. This paper describes the improvement of the commercial bilingual concordancer TransSearch in order to embed a word alignment feature. The use of statistical word alignment methods allows the system to spot user query translations, and thus the tool is transformed into a translation search engine. We describe several translation identification and postprocessing algorithms that enhance the application. The excellent results obtained using a large translation memory consisting of 8.3 million sentence pairs are confirmed via human evaluation.
Translators and machines: working together
Man vs. Machine? Vol. I. Proceedings of XXth World Congress of the International Federation of Translators, 2014
The increasing use of language technologies has prompted an interest in their impact on cognitive processes and translation products. Potential issues related to human-machine interactions include working conditions, time and resource management, and emotional factors. Drawing on a large corpus of translation processes collected from professionals and students, we discuss the nature of translation as a cognitive and organizational activity. We argue that professional translators need to take increased ownership of language technology tools at every stage: in their development, their application, and their integration into organizational processes. This has implications for industry standards, models of translation expertise, and translation didactics.
Studying Human Translation Behavior with User-activity Data
2008
The paper introduces a new research strategy for the investigation of human translation behavior. While conventional cognitive research methods make use of think aloud protocols (TAP), we introduce and investigate User-Activity Data (UAD). UAD consists of the translator's recorded keystroke and eye-movement behavior, which makes it possible to replay a translation session and to register the subjects' comments on their own behavior during a retrospective interview. UAD has the advantage of being objective and reproducable, and, in contrast to TAP, does not interfere with the translation process. The paper gives the background of this technique and an example on a English-to-Danish translation. Our goal is to elaborate and investigate cognitively grounded basic translation concepts which are materialized and traceable in the UAD and which, in a later stage, will provide the basis for appropriate and targeted help for the translator at a given moment.
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology, 2017
This paper describes an approach to translating course unit descriptions from Italian and German into English, using a phrase-based machine translation (MT) system. The genre is very prominent among those requiring translation by universities in European countries in which English is a non-native language. For each language combination, an in-domain bilingual corpus including course unit and degree program descriptions is used to train an MT engine, whose output is then compared to a baseline engine trained on the Europarl corpus. In a subsequent experiment, a bilingual terminology database is added to the training sets in both engines and its impact on the output quality is evaluated based on BLEU and postediting score. Results suggest that the use of domain-specific corpora boosts the engines quality for both language combinations, especially for German-English, whereas adding terminological resources does not seem to bring notable benefits.