Stella Neumann

Translation units and grammatical shifts: Towards an integration of product- and process-based translation research

Drawing on corpus-based and process-based approaches, this paper reports on the results of an exploratory study using highly annotated translation corpora in conjunction with key logging, eye tracking, and retrospective verbalizations to identify translation units associated with cognitive effort during a translation task. The annotated corpora are used to analyze the grammatical shifts correlated with the processes of (de)metaphorization that occur during translation. The results of the corpus analysis are then triangulated with process data from an analysis of the performance of two German-English translators while carrying out an inverse translation task. Together the process and product data clearly explicate the nature of the translation units associated with (de)metaphorization during the cognitive processing of the translation.

Cross-linguistic corpora for the study of translations : insights from the language pair English-German

This book is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and - more generally - to language comparison and language contact with a focus on English and German. Methodologically, the contributors implement an empirical research strategy with further applications in computational linguistics and language technology.

Multi-dimensional annotation and alignment in an English-German translation corpus

This paper presents the compilation of the CroCo Corpus, an English-German translation corpus. Corpus design, annotation and alignment are described in detail. In order to guarantee the searchability and exchangeability of the corpus, XML stand-off mark-up is used as representation format for the multi-layer annotation. On this basis it is shown how the corpus can be queried using XQuery. Furthermore, the generalisation of results in terms of linguistic and translational research questions is briefly discussed.

Part of Speech Annotation of Intermediate Versions in the Keystroke Logged Translation Corpus

Translation process data contains noncanonical features such as incomplete word tokens, non-sequential string modifications and syntactically deficient structures. While these features are often removed for the final translation product, they are present in the unfolding text (i.e. intermediate translation versions). This paper describes tools developed to semi-automatically process intermediate versions of translation data to facilitate quantitative analysis of linguistic means employed in translation strategies. We examine the data from a translation experiment with the help of these tools.

EmoLiTe — A database for emotion detection during literary text reading

Observing an individual while reading a text reveals a complex interplay of contextual features. The features are an important part of understanding why a reader reacted in a certain way to a given text, e.g. by expressing an emotion, showing interest or demonstrating dislike. Capturing all these aspects in one database is thus a challenging task. In this paper the context based EmoLiTe database is introduced, which brings together literary text reading experiments using aligned video and eye-tracking data with post-experiment reader annotations. EmoLiTe is released for free and thus contributes to both the emotion and reading research community by providing them with a novel context based corpora.

The impact of translation direction on characteristics of translated texts. A multivariate analysis for English and German

This paper investigates the influence of the source and target language on translations in a selection of 150 pairs of source and target texts from a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and German texts, applying a combination of multivariate analysis, visualization and minimally supervised machine learning. Based on a procedure developed by Diwersy, Evert and Neumann (2014), it investigates the way in which translations differ from comparable original texts depending on the translation direction and other factors. The multivariate approach enables us to detect patterns of feature combinations that cannot be observed in conventional frequency-based analyses, providing new evidence for the validity of interference or shining through in translation. We report a clear shining through effect that is more pronounced for translations from English into German than for the opposite translation direction, pointing towards a prestige effect in this language pair.

Changes Of Word Class During Translation : Insights From A Combined Analysis Of Corpus, Keystroke Logging And Eye-Tracking Data

Drawing upon the data collected in a translation experiment, this study combines productand process-based analyses of translations with a focus on word class shifts. The keystroke logged translation corpus used in the paper consists not only of source and target texts, but also of the corresponding log files of the translation process data. Thus, in addition to the analyses of the final translation products, this corpus allows us to study changes of word class in the intermediate versions present during the translation process. We also use the complementary eye-tracking data to test our initial assumptions about the cognitive processing associated with nouns, verbs and shifts between these two word classes.

CoCoGen – Complexity Contour Generator: Automatic Assessment of Linguistic Complexity Using a Sliding-Window Technique

We present a novel approach to the automatic assessment of text complexity based on a sliding-window technique that tracks the distribution of complexity within a text. Such distribution is captured by what we term “complexity contours” derived from a series of measurements for a given linguistic complexity measure. This approach is implemented in an automatic computational tool, CoCoGen – Complexity Contour Generator, which in its current version supports 32 indices of linguistic complexity. The goal of the paper is twofold: (1) to introduce the design of our computational tool based on a sliding-window technique and (2) to showcase this approach in the area of second language (L2) learning, i.e. more specifically, in the area of L2 writing.

Exploiting the Incomparability of Comparable Corpora for Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies

For empirical research in translation studies and contrastive linguistics comparability across languages is an important and non-trivial issue, particularly, if we aim at quantifying differences and commonalities. We approach this problem by investigating the CroCo Corpus of English and German originals and translations in eight different registers concentrating on the (in)comparability of the different subcorpora. They are comparable across languages but incomparable in terms of functional, i.e. register, variation. A feature matrix is analysed to reveal differences and commonalities between the bilingually comparable texts (i.e. English and German originals) and the monolingually comparable texts (originals and translations in the same language). The study draws on deep, multilayer annotation and sophisticated querying methods to quantify the features. The interpretation is based on a statistical analysis of the query results enabling to bridge the gap between qualitative properties of the language systems involved and their quantitative instantiations in texts.

How to Overcome Registerial Translation Problems: a corpus-based approach

This article aims at outlining an application of an English-German translation corpus annotated on the basis of language specific register features. We discuss the relevance of cross-linguistic register differences for translation and show how translators can benefit from registerially annotated parallel corpora, which serve as on-line references offering register-oriented translation solutions.