Date : 27/06/17
Titre : Ouverture de TALN 2017
Conférence plénière de Shuly Wintner : "Computational Approaches to the Study of Translation"


Résumé de la conférence plénière :
Translated texts, in any language, have unique characteristics that set them apart from texts originally written in the same language; to some extent, they form a sub-language, called "translationese". Translation Studies is the research field that investigates these characteristics. I will first survey some theoretical hypotheses of translation studies. I will distinguish between properties resulting from interference from the source language (the so-called "fingerprints" of the source language on the translation product) and properties that are source-language-independent, and that are presumably universal. The latter include phenomena resulting from three main processes: simplification, standardization and explicitation.

I will describe research that uses standard (supervised and unsupervised) text classification techniques to distinguish between translations and originals, in several languages. I will focus on the features that best separate between the two classes, and how these features corroborate some (but not all) of the hypotheses set forth by translation studies scholars. More generally, I will show how computational methodologies shed light on pertinent translation studies questions.

Finally, I will touch upon some related issues and current research directions. I will discuss recent work that addresses the identification of the source language from which target language texts were translated. I will show that native language identification (in particular, of language learners) is a closely related task to the identification of translationese. Time permitting, I will also mention work aimed at distinguishing between native and (advanced, fluent) non-native speakers.