{"title":"Universals in machine translation?","authors":"Jinru Luo, Dechao Li","doi":"10.1075/ijcl.19127.luo","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nBy examining and comparing the linguistic patterns in a self-built corpus of Chinese-English translations produced by WeChat Translate, the latest online machine translation app from the most popular social media platform (WeChat) in China, this study explores such questions as whether or not and to what extent simplification and normalization (hypothesized Translation Universals) exhibit themselves in these translations. The results show that, whereas simplification cannot be substantiated, the tendency of normalization to occur in the WeChat translations can be confirmed. The research finds that these results are caused by the operating mechanism of machine translation (MT) systems. Certain salient words tend to prime WeChat’s MT system to repetitively resort to typical language patterns, which leads to a significant overuse of lexical chunks. It is hoped that the present study can shed new light on the development of MT systems and encourage more corpus-based product-oriented research on MT.","PeriodicalId":46843,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Corpus Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"10","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Corpus Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19127.luo","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 10
Abstract
By examining and comparing the linguistic patterns in a self-built corpus of Chinese-English translations produced by WeChat Translate, the latest online machine translation app from the most popular social media platform (WeChat) in China, this study explores such questions as whether or not and to what extent simplification and normalization (hypothesized Translation Universals) exhibit themselves in these translations. The results show that, whereas simplification cannot be substantiated, the tendency of normalization to occur in the WeChat translations can be confirmed. The research finds that these results are caused by the operating mechanism of machine translation (MT) systems. Certain salient words tend to prime WeChat’s MT system to repetitively resort to typical language patterns, which leads to a significant overuse of lexical chunks. It is hoped that the present study can shed new light on the development of MT systems and encourage more corpus-based product-oriented research on MT.
期刊介绍：
The International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (IJCL) publishes original research covering methodological, applied and theoretical work in any area of corpus linguistics. Through its focus on empirical language research, IJCL provides a forum for the presentation of new findings and innovative approaches in any area of linguistics (e.g. lexicology, grammar, discourse analysis, stylistics, sociolinguistics, morphology, contrastive linguistics), applied linguistics (e.g. language teaching, forensic linguistics), and translation studies. Based on its interest in corpus methodology, IJCL also invites contributions on the interface between corpus and computational linguistics.
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