translating in the 21st century in a 20th century corpus culture

Translating in the 21st Century in a 20th Century Corpus Culture

Randall A. MajorFaculty of PhilosophyUniversity of Novi Sad

Two words of thanks

Personal Background

• Translator• Teacher of (future) translators• Interested in Corpus Linguistics

Reflections based on experience

Some (Translator) Frustrations

• The software, often magnificent, is equally often not very user-friendly

User Friendliness?

Some (Translator) Frustrations

• The software, often magnificent, is equally often not very user-friendly

• It seems that sometimes programmers don’t think of the end users and their needs (don’t take into account the specificities of Serbian, for example)

• Little effort has been made to make Serbian itself user-friendly (jeste comes from biti?)

More (Translator) Frustrations

• Based on Fallacies:– It’s enough to be bilingual to be a translator– Everyone in Serbia “speaks English” and therefore

almost anyone can be a translator– Translation is seen as “type this Serbian text out

for me in X language”– “We have enormous lexical resources available –

RMS is in 6 volumes (or one big one), and RSANU is nearly finished at volume 20”

Difficulties

• The problem of alphabet(s)• The problem of historical dictionaries vs.

usage dictionaries• The problem of up-to-date dictionaries• The problem of translation dictionaries• Creating a Serbian to English parallel corpus:

what might it mean?

The Problem of Alphabets

• Great advances made possible with the introduction of Unicode

• Serbian is specific – represented in two alphabets

• The characters occupy different spaces in the Unicode map

Unicode addresses for ć and ћ

The Problem of Alphabets

• Great advances made possible with the introduction of Unicode

• Serbian is specific – represented in two alphabets

• The characters occupy different spaces in the Unicode map

• > Many computer tools are unable to cope with the differences (even simple searches, TM, etc.)

The Problem of Historical vs Usage Dictionaries

• The most important dictionaries in Serbian are HISTORICAL and not USAGE dictionaries.

• Flood of new terminology coming from other languages, especially English.• Creation of unnecessary words, false friends (e.g. mobbing

vs. мобинг)

• Changes in meaning over time NOT encapsulated

• Shifts of “primary meaning”

The Case of InačeRMS RSANUPrilog+adverbial Prilog1. na drugi način, drukčije 1. u drukčijem, suprotnom

slučaju, u protivnom2. a. osim toga, pored toga 2. a. posmatrano u celini,

uopšte uzevši b. po drugim osobinama, b. i bez toga, i bez obzira

s drugog gledišta na dati slučaj, ionako c. uostalom c. na drugom mestu, na

drugim mestima 3. u suprotnom slučaju 3. a. obično, redovno, u

drugoj prilici, u drugim prilikama b. po drugom imenu, ili

drukčije 4. na drugi način, drukčije;

različito; suprotno

The Case of Inače

RMS RSANUPrilog+adverbial Prilog1. na drugi način, drukčije 1. u drukčijem, suprotnom

slučaju, u protivnom2. a. osim toga, pored toga 2. a. posmatrano u celini,

uopšte uzevši b. po drugim osobinama, b. i bez toga, i bez obziras drugog gledišta na dati slučaj, ionako c. uostalom c. na drugom mestu, na drugim mestima

3. u suprotnom slučaju 3. a. obično, redovno, u drugoj prilici, u drugim prilikamab. po drugom imenu, ili drukčije 4. na drugi način, drukčije; različito; suprotno

The problem of up-to-date dictionaries

• Is there an up-to-date, corpus based dictionary of the Serbian language?

• Are the meanings copied from former (historical) dictionaries or derived from usage?

• Learner’s dictionaries, specialized (medical, legal, engineering…) dictionaries, frequency dictionaries, based on a modern corpus?

The problem of translation dictionaries

• If you don’t have a modern, corpus based dictionary, it’s really hard to have an accurate translation dictionary…

The Case of Inače

MB ŽBinače - adverb inače - adverb 1. otherwise 1. otherwise; else2. (+ i) already, anyway, 2. (+ i) anyway

anyhow

Note that there were 20 nuances of meaning given in the Serbian dictionaries

Creating a Serbian to English parallel corpus: what might it mean?

• Work in progress: A Parallel Literary Corpus Serbian into English

• Carefully chosen, representative (important for multi-lingual parallel corpus)

• Modern authors (David Albahari, Ivo Andrić, Vladislav Bajac, Svetislav Basara, Miloš Crnjanski, Danilo Kiš, Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Mirjana Novaković, Vida Ognjenović, Milorad Pavić, Milisav Savić, Slobodan Selenić, Meša Selimović, Srdjan

Valjarević, Milovan Vitezović, etc.), SPiT• “Official” published translations

Benefits?

• To see how native speakers of English experience Serbian words, phrases, syntax, sentence focus, etc.

• To clarify syntactic similarities and differences in the two languages

• To study the possible existence of translationese in terms of phrasing, adverbial usage, tense vs. aspect

Benefits?

• Training of future translators based on actual corpus evidence as opposed to “because I said so…”

• More objective evaluation of translations based on corpus results instead of intuition

• Possible applications in MT…• Possible aid in developing primary meanings

for Serbian words in Serbian monolingual dictionaries

Conclusion

• The national Serbian corpus must have a parallel corpus (if possible a multilingual one)

• The parallel corpus must have a scope beyond literature

• The parallel corpus would benefit everyone – teachers, translators, lexicographers, dictionary users, and so on…

That’s all for now…

Thank you for your attention!

translating in the 21st century in a 20th century corpus culture

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