Multi-retranslation corpora : visibility, variation, value, and virtue

Cheesman, Tom and Flanagan, Kevin and Thiel, Stephan and Rybicki, Jan and Laramee, Robert S. and Hope, Jonathan and Roos, Avraham (2016) Multi-retranslation corpora : visibility, variation, value, and virtue. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. ISSN 2055-768X (https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw027)

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Abstract

Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most 'attitude' (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of 40 German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers.

  • Item type:Article
    ID code:57496
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    23 August 2016
    Published
    1 June 2016
    Accepted
    11 April 2016
    Submitted
    Notes:This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities following peer review. The version of record, Multi-retranslation corpora: visibility, variation, value and virtue, Tom Cheesman, Kevin Flanagan, Stephan Thiel, Jan Rybicki, Robert S. Laramee, Jonathan Hope, Avraham Roos, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2016), is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw027
    Subjects:Language and Literature > Philology. Linguistics
    Department:Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Humanities > English
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:22 Aug 2016 13:22
    Last modified:08 Apr 2024 22:57
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/57496
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