Abstract
During recent years, MT research has imported a number of conceptual tools from Translation Studies such as “translationese” or “translation universals”. These notions were the object of intense conceptual debates in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS), and number of seminal publications and conference forums recommended substituting them by less problematic terms such as “the language of translation” or “typical” or “general features of translated language”. This paper critically analyses the arguments put forward in the early 2000’s in CBTS to against the use of these terms, and whether the same issues apply to current MT re-search using them. Here, the paper will discuss, (1) the impact of the negative or pejorative nature of the term “translationese” on the status of professional translators and translation products in academia and society (2) the danger of over-generalizations or overextending claims found in specific and very limited textual subsets, as well as (3) the need to reframe the search of tendencies in translated language away from “universals” towards probabilistic, situational or conditional tendencies. It will be argued that MT re-search would benefit from clearly defined terms to deal with notions related to language variation in specific new variants of translation, proposing neutral terms such as “NMT translated language” or “the language of NMT”, as well as “general features/ tendencies in NMT / PE translations”. A proposal will be made in order to reach a “convergence” of MT and TS research and the probabilistic and descriptive study of features of (NMT or human) translated language.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eamt-1.25
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tampere, Finland
- Editors:
- Mary Nurminen, Judith Brenner, Maarit Koponen, Sirkku Latomaa, Mikhail Mikhailov, Frederike Schierl, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Eva Vanmassenhove, Sergi Alvarez Vidal, Nora Aranberri, Mara Nunziatini, Carla Parra Escartín, Mikel Forcada, Maja Popovic, Carolina Scarton, Helena Moniz
- Venue:
- EAMT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Association for Machine Translation
- Note:
- Pages:
- 261–268
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eamt-1.25
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Miguel A. Jimenez-Crespo. 2023. “Translationese” (and “post-editese”?) no more: on importing fuzzy conceptual tools from Translation Studies in MT research. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 261–268, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
- Cite (Informal):
- “Translationese” (and “post-editese”?) no more: on importing fuzzy conceptual tools from Translation Studies in MT research (Jimenez-Crespo, EAMT 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2023.eamt-1.25.pdf