Emily J. Tetzlaff, Kristina-Marie T. Janetos, Katie E. Wagar
et al.
Objectives: Heat-health communication initiatives are a key public health protection strategy. Therefore, understanding the potential challenges that all Canadians and specific groups, such as those facing literacy barriers and non-native language speakers, may experience in accessing or interpreting information, is critical. Methods: This study reviewed and evaluated the language availability, readability, suitability, and comprehensibility of heat-related webpages and online resources (n = 417) published on public health authority websites in Canada (n = 73). Six validated readability scales and a comprehensibility instrument were used. Results: Most content was presented in English (90 %); however, only 7 % of the online resources were available in more than one language. The average reading grade level of the content (grade 8) exceeded the recommended level (grade 6), and only 22 % of the content was deemed superior for suitability and comprehensibility. Conclusions: Our study evaluating web-based materials about extreme heat published by Canadian health authorities provides evidence that the current language availability, readability, suitability, and comprehensibility may be limiting the capacity for members of the public to discern key messaging. Innovation: To ensure all Canadians can access and interpret information related to heat-health protection, public health authorities may consider translating their materials into additional languages and incorporating a readability evaluation to improve public understanding.
Translating electronic health record (EHR) narratives from English to Spanish is a clinically important yet challenging task due to the lack of a parallel-aligned corpus and the abundant unknown words contained. To address such challenges, we propose \textbf{NOOV} (for No OOV), a new neural machine translation (NMT) system that requires little in-domain parallel-aligned corpus for training. NOOV integrates a bilingual lexicon automatically learned from parallel-aligned corpora and a phrase look-up table extracted from a large biomedical knowledge resource, to alleviate both the unknown word problem and the word-repeat challenge in NMT, enhancing better phrase generation of NMT systems. Evaluation shows that NOOV is able to generate better translation of EHR with improvement in both accuracy and fluency.
Iñaki Lacunza, Javier Garcia Gilabert, Francesca De Luca Fornaciari
et al.
We present ACADATA, a high-quality parallel dataset for academic translation, that consists of two subsets: ACAD-TRAIN, which contains approximately 1.5 million author-generated paragraph pairs across 96 language directions and ACAD-BENCH, a curated evaluation set of almost 6,000 translations covering 12 directions. To validate its utility, we fine-tune two Large Language Models (LLMs) on ACAD-TRAIN and benchmark them on ACAD-BENCH against specialized machine-translation systems, general-purpose, open-weight LLMs, and several large-scale proprietary models. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning on ACAD-TRAIN leads to improvements in academic translation quality by +6.1 and +12.4 d-BLEU points on average for 7B and 2B models respectively, while also improving long-context translation in a general domain by up to 24.9% when translating out of English. The fine-tuned top-performing model surpasses the best propietary and open-weight models on academic translation domain. By releasing ACAD-TRAIN, ACAD-BENCH and the fine-tuned models, we provide the community with a valuable resource to advance research in academic domain and long-context translation.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian writing system, are composed entirely of drawings. Translating these glyphs into English poses various challenges, including the fact that a single glyph can have multiple meanings. Deep learning translation applications are evolving rapidly, producing remarkable results that significantly impact our lives. In this research, we propose a method for the automatic recognition and translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from images to English. This study utilized two datasets for classification and translation: the Morris Franken dataset and the EgyptianTranslation dataset. Our approach is divided into three stages: segmentation (using Contour and Detectron2), mapping symbols to Gardiner codes, and translation (using the CNN model). The model achieved a BLEU score of 42.2, a significant result compared to previous research.
Translating Chinese classics is always a difficult task in literary translation. But when literary translation occurs in political discourse, the situation becomes even more complex. In political discourse, citing of Chinese classics is usually used as an evocative tool to arouse the audiences’ empathy with the aim of gaining acceptance and shaping the speaker’s language style. Consequently, the purpose of translation under the specific political contexts becomes an important issue when evaluating the effectiveness of literary translation in political discourse. This study examines the effectiveness of literary translation embedded in political discourse by drawing on reception theory and descriptive translation studies to identify the factors that have an impact on target readers’ reception of the translation and in turn set up a evaluating framework of translation effectiveness.
Dieser Aufsatz befasst sich mit dem komplexen Zusammenspiel zwischen Sprache und Identität in zwei Werken der deutschsprachigen interkulturellen Autorin Marica Bodrožić. Mit einem Fokus auf Metapherngebrauch und eingebettete Bedeutungsebenen untersucht der Aufsatz die Identitätsreflexion sowie die Wirklichkeitsentwürfe in Sterne erben, Sterne färben. Meine Ankunft in Wörtern und Das Wasser unserer Träume. Die Studie zielt in diesem Sinne darauf ab, den Sprachgebrauch durch die Autorin als Werkzeug zur Identitätskonstruktion sowie zur Gestaltung metaphorischer Alternativen bzw. Wirklichkeitsentwürfe in Betracht zu ziehen.
Geography. Anthropology. Recreation, Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar
TRANSLATION OF THE EXPERIMENT – TWO POEMS BY DANIIL KHARMS TRANSLATED BY WIKTOR WOROSZYLSKI
The article concerns two poems by Daniil Kharms (Нéтеперь and Фадеев, Калдеев и Пепермалдеев…) translated by Wiktor Woroszylski (Nieteraz and Fadiejew, Kałdiejew i Piepiermałdiejew…). This translation was considered in the context of a poetic experiment used by the Russian author. On the one hand, free verse (Nieteraz) and on the other hand, accentual-syllabic verse (Fadiejew…) were compared to their translations. Irrespective of the form, both the striving to reproduce the absurdity characteristic of Kharms and smoothing out the non-normative punctuation of the original can be noticed in Woroszylski’s translations. In addition to the conclusions regarding the decision of a particular translator, attention was also drawn to the need of taking into account the characteristics of a given text (experiment and absurdity) and the relationship between the translation and the literature in a given period of time.
On Wikipedia, articles are categorized to aid readers in navigating content efficiently. The manual creation of new categories can be laborious and time-intensive. To tackle this issue, we built language models to translate Wikipedia categories from English to Vietnamese with a dataset containing 15,000 English-Vietnamese category pairs. Subsequently, small to medium-scale Transformer pre-trained models with a sequence-to-sequence architecture were fine-tuned for category translation. The experiments revealed that OPUS-MT-en-vi surpassed other models, attaining the highest performance with a BLEU score of 0.73, despite its smaller model storage. We expect our paper to be an alternative solution for translation tasks with limited computer resources.
It is challenging to generate high-quality instruction datasets for non-English languages due to tail phenomena, which limit performance on less frequently observed data. To mitigate this issue, we propose translating existing high-quality English instruction datasets as a solution, emphasizing the need for complete and instruction-aware translations to maintain the inherent attributes of these datasets. We claim that fine-tuning LLMs with datasets translated in this way can improve their performance in the target language. To this end, we introduces a new translation framework tailored for instruction datasets, named InstaTrans (INSTruction-Aware TRANSlation). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of InstaTrans over other competitors in terms of completeness and instruction-awareness of translation, highlighting its potential to broaden the accessibility of LLMs across diverse languages at a relatively low cost. Furthermore, we have validated that fine-tuning LLMs with datasets translated by InstaTrans can effectively improve their performance in the target language.
Multi-modal brain images from MRI scans are widely used in clinical diagnosis to provide complementary information from different modalities. However, obtaining fully paired multi-modal images in practice is challenging due to various factors, such as time, cost, and artifacts, resulting in modality-missing brain images. To address this problem, unsupervised multi-modal brain image translation has been extensively studied. Existing methods suffer from the problem of brain tumor deformation during translation, as they fail to focus on the tumor areas when translating the whole images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised tumor-aware distillation teacher-student network called UTAD-Net, which is capable of perceiving and translating tumor areas precisely. Specifically, our model consists of two parts: a teacher network and a student network. The teacher network learns an end-to-end mapping from source to target modality using unpaired images and corresponding tumor masks first. Then, the translation knowledge is distilled into the student network, enabling it to generate more realistic tumor areas and whole images without masks. Experiments show that our model achieves competitive performance on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of image quality compared with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the generated images on downstream segmentation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/scut-HC/UTAD-Net.
<p>This research work seeks to ascertain the translatability of living together in La promesse de Malingo by Pierre Fandio into English as an asset for the sustainability of the united Cameroon. Five elements helped the researcher attain the above objective: multilingualism, implicit, explicit, bilingualism and onomastics. This study poses the problem of the strategies used by a translator to produce an equivalent effect in the minds of the receptors of the target text. Two hypotheses carried the researcher through the present research: the first one stated that Bilingualism, multilingualism, explicit, onomastics and implicit are situations of living together that exist in the novel La Promesse de Malingo. The second said that macro and micro translation strategies could be relevant for the translation of togetherness into English in the novel. A micro textual analysis of the novel with 50 excerpts obtained from the novel confirmed the presence of the above elements as situations of living together found in the novel. Foreignisation as a macro translation strategy had an 86% usage while literal translation as a micro translation strategy carried a 50% occurrence which is the highest as compared to other micro translation strategies. The polysystem theory, with a 60% usage, happens to be the key translation theory of this work, showing that although words are important in translation, the context plays a vital role. The latter conclusion helps ascertain the translatability of living together and thus validates the hypotheses of this research. Recommendations and suggestions for further research were thus made. </p><p>La présente étude intitulée : vers une traduction du vivre ensemble au sein de la crise identitaire s’inscrit dans le domaine de la traduction littéraire. Elle vise à déterminer la traduisibilité du vivre ensemble dans l’œuvre La Promesse de Malingo de Pierre Fandio vers l’Anglais, comme un atout pour le maintien du Cameroun uni. Cinq éléments nous ont permis d'atteindre cet objectif : le multilinguisme, l'implicite, l'explicite, le bilinguisme et l'onomastique. Cette étude pose le problème des stratégies utilisées par un traducteur pour produire un effet équivalent dans l'esprit des récepteurs du texte cible. Deux hypothèses ont guidé le chercheur tout au long de la présente recherche : la première affirme que le bilinguisme, le multilinguisme, l'explicite, l'onomastique et l'implicite sont des situations de vivre ensemble qui existent dans le roman La Promesse de Malingo. La seconde affirme que les stratégies de macro et micro-traduction pourraient être pertinentes pour la traduction du vivre ensemble en anglais dans le roman. Une analyse micro textuelle constitué de 50 extraits du roman a confirmé la présence des éléments susmentionnés comme situations de vivre ensemble dans le roman. L'étrangéisation en tant que macro-stratégie de traduction a été utilisée à 86 %. Cependant, la traduction littérale comme micro-stratégie de traduction a été utilisée à 50 %, ce qui est le taux le plus élevé par rapport à d'autres micro-stratégies de traduction. La théorie du polysystème, utilisée à 60 %, s'est avérée être la théorie de traduction phare de ce travail ; ce pourcentage démontre bien que les mots sont tout aussi important que le contexte en traduction. Cette conclusion permet de vérifier la traduisibilité du vivre ensemble et donc de valider les hypothèses de cette recherche. Des recommandations et des suggestions pour la suite de la recherche ont ainsi été formulées. </p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0722/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
<p>End-of-year speeches are one of the most important communication tools President Paul Biya has used throughout his reign. Due to their importance, their impact and their nature, they attract both national and international attention. However, despite their crucial role in the political welfare of the country, very few studies venture into these speeches, not even to highlight their merits. This paper is an analytical study of the translation and interpretation of modality, a central feature of the speeches, alongside others. The study intends to shed light on the translation and interpretation methods used in translating and interpreting modality as used in the President’s end-of-year speeches. It is a corpus-based study with a qualitative research design where the Descriptive Translation Study (DTS) was used to analyse the data. Findings reveal that the corpus includes epistemic, deontic, and dynamic modalities, expressed conveyed through modal verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, lexical verbs, and modalising expressions. The employed method involved the following micro-strategies: literal translation, modulation, reformulation, transposition, and omission. Two macro-strategies were used, domestication and foreignization, with the former being the dominant.</p><p>Les discours de fin d'année constituent l'un des outils de communication les plus importants utilisés par le Président Paul Biya tout au long de son règne. En raison de leur importance, de leur impact et de leur nature, ils attirent l'attention tant sur le plan nationale qu'internationale. Cependant, malgré leur rôle crucial dans le bien-être politique du pays, très peu d'études se penchent sur ces discours, même pour en souligner les mérites. Cet article est une étude analytique de la traduction et de l'interprétation de la modalité, une caractéristique centrale des discours, parmi tant d'autres. L'étude vise à élucider les méthodes de traduction et d'interprétation utilisées pour traduire et interpréter la modalité telle qu'elle est employée dans les discours de fin d'année du Président. Il s'agit d'une étude basée sur un corpus et suivant la méthode de recherche qualitative, où l'étude descriptive de la traduction (DTS) a été utilisée pour analyser les données. Les résultats révèlent que le corpus comprend des modalités épistémiques, déontiques et dynamiques, exprimées par des verbes modaux, des noms, des adjectifs, des adverbes, des verbes lexicaux et des expressions de modalisation. La méthode employée impliquait les micro-stratégies suivantes : traduction littérale, modulation, reformulation, transposition et omission. Deux macro-stratégies ont été utilisées, la domestication et l'étrangéisation, la première étant dominante.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0729/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
The chairman’s statement of the corporate annual report plays an important role in informing the decision-making of investors. Thus, it is often targeted at an international audience. The present study compares the syntactic complexity of translated chairman’s statements (Chinese to English) and non-translated ones (English), to determine the role that translation plays in conveying the chairman’s message. The results show that translated chairman’s statements are significantly simpler in subordination as well as overall sentence complexity, using fewer verbal phrases and T-units than the non-translated ones. However, translated chairman’s statements have longer length of production units, use more coordinate phrases and complex nominals than their non-translated counterparts. The findings indicate that simplification exists in half of the 14 syntactic complexity measures, providing some evidence for the simplification universal. They also reveal that in addition to translation universals, social factors also affect the complexity level of translated and non-translated chairman’s statements. The findings of the present study contribute to a systematic understanding of syntactic features of translated and non-translated chairman’s statements, enrich the present knowledge of translation universals and provide pedagogical implications for translation teaching and training in the context of Chinese-English translation.
HISTORY, THEORY, DIDACTICS: MICHEL BALLARD’S TRANSLATION STUDIES
This article intends to show to what extent Michel Ballard’s contribution to the Translation Studies literature is essential and has made him one of the most important figures in the field. Indeed, he not only contributed to have translation science taught at the University along with translation courses but also developed it as a proper field of research, independent from – though related to – linguistics. Ballard nearly left no stone unturned and interested at the same time in theoretical, historical and teaching aspects of translation. His views, always based on the observation of corpora, include aspects often widely neglected by translation theorists such as the translator’s creativity and resulted in a renewed conception of translation units including subjectivity. Ballard wrote 120 articles and 25 books, a lot of them being well-known references for whoever has an interest in translation.
In this paper we obtain several properties of translating solitons for a general class of extrinsic geometric curvature flows given by a homogeneous, symmetric, smooth non-negative function $γ$ defined in an open cone $Γ\subset\mathbb{R}^n$. The main results are tangential principles, nonexistence theorems for closed and entire solutions, and a uniqueness result that says that any strictly convex $γ$-translator defined on a ball with a single end $\mathcal{C}^2$-asymptotic to a cylinder is the ''bowl''-type solution found in the translator paper of S. Rengaswami.
There is growing interest in software migration as the development of software and society. Manually migrating projects between languages is error-prone and expensive. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore automatic program translation using supervised deep learning techniques by learning from large-scale parallel code corpus. However, parallel resources are scarce in the programming language domain, and it is costly to collect bilingual data manually. To address this issue, several unsupervised programming translation systems are proposed. However, these systems still rely on huge monolingual source code to train, which is very expensive. Besides, these models cannot perform well for translating the languages that are not seen during the pre-training procedure. In this paper, we propose SDA-Trans, a syntax and domain-aware model for program translation, which leverages the syntax structure and domain knowledge to enhance the cross-lingual transfer ability. SDA-Trans adopts unsupervised training on a smaller-scale corpus, including Python and Java monolingual programs. The experimental results on function translation tasks between Python, Java, and C++ show that SDA-Trans outperforms many large-scale pre-trained models, especially for unseen language translation.