Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Direct translation no intermediary sentence structure translation proceeds in a number of steps, each step dedicated to a specific task the most important component is the bilingual dictionary typically general language problems with –ambiguity –inflection –word order and other structural shifts

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Simplistic approach sentence splitting tokenisation handling capital letters dictionary look-up and lexical substitution copying unknown words, digits, signs of punctuation etc. formal editing

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Advanced classical approach ( Tucker 1987) Source text dictionary lookups and morphological analysis Identification of homographs Identification of compound nouns Identification of nouns and verb phrases Processing of idioms

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Advanced approach, cont. processing of prepositions subject-predicate identification syntactic ambiguity identification synthesis and morphological processing of target text rearrangement of words and phrases in target text

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Feasibility of the direct translation strategy Is it possible to carry out the direct translation steps as suggested by Tucker with sufficient precision without relying on a sentence grammar and an intermediary structure?

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Example, 1 Sv. Ytterst handlar kampen för sysselsättning om att hålla samman Sverige. En. Ultimately, the fight for full employment concerns the cohesion of Swedish society. (from Statement of Government Policy 1996)

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Assignment 1: Hable Con Ella (en-sv) Make a general quality assessment of the translation. Suggest a possible use of a translation of this kind. Identify the steps that were taken in the translation. Specify the translation errors that were made and discuss them. Suggest improvements in the framework of the direct translation strategy. Motivate them. Formalise them in a framework of your own choice. Discuss their general adequacy in the translation of Swedish to English.

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Current trends in direct translation re-use of translations –translation memories of sentences and sub-sentence units such as words, phrases and larger units –example-based translation –statistical translation Will re-use of translations overcome the problems with the direct translation approach that were discussed above? If so, how can they be handled?

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Systran System Translation developped in the US by Peter Toma first version 1969 (Ru-En) EC bought the rights of Systran in 1976 currently 18 language pairs no Swedish

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Systran, cont. more than 1,600,000 dictionary units 20 domain dictionaries daily use by EC translators, administrators of the European institutions originally a direct translation strategy –see H&S to-day more of a transfer-based strategy

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Motivations for transfer-based translation lexical ambiguity structural differences See further Ingo 91 (6), Wikholm (89)

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Example, 2 Sv. Fyll på olja i växellådan.  En. Fill gearbox with oil. (from the Scania corpus) fyll på  fill obj  adv adv  obj

Anna Sågvall Hein, GSLT, January 2003 Example, 3 Sv. I oljefilterhållaren sitter en överströmningsventil.  En. The oil filter retainer has an overflow valve. (from the Scania corpus) sitter  has adv  subj subj  obj