Translation & Technology (Session 2)

Session 2
Translation Studies and Translation Technology
Translation theories
• For centuries, until the second half of the twentieth century, the word-for-word approach, which refers to the
replacement of one word in the source-language text with another in the target-language text, was pitched against
the sense-for-sense approach, more concerned with preserving the meaning of the source-language text rather than
its precise wording, but without being completely ‘free’.
• The period between the 1950s and the 1960s saw the dominance of linguistic theories that focused on the
description and analysis of translation procedures. For example: Vinay and Darbelnet’s work identifies a
number of different strategies and procedures of translation.
✓ Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar: Deep structure/ Surface structure
• In the early 1980s, Peter Newmark introduced the dichotomy of ‘semantic translation’, which
follows as closely as possible the semantic and syntactic structures of the source language text,
and ‘communicative translation’, which is focused on the reader and ‘attempts to produce . . . an
effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original’ (Newmark 1981: 39),
recalling Nida’s well-known ‘dynamic equivalence’.
✓ Skopos theory based on functional approaches: Shifting from linguistic-based translation to

the way a translation functions in the target society and culture.
Thus, translation is seen as a process of intercultural communication where the translated text is
capable of functioning according to specific target situations and uses (Mason 1998: 33). In
other words, translation is guided by how the target-language text will be used by its intended
readers. According to Trujillo (1999: 3), the Skopos theory of translation strategy ‘arose as a
response to the growing need for
non-literary translation’. The
focus on the purpose of the
target text in relation to its
translation setting resonates with
a common definition of
translation quality as ‘fitness for
purpose’.
Linguistic theories in machine translation systems

In subsequent machine translation system designs, two linguistic approaches or grammars are
considered useful: the formal and the functional. The formal approach puts emphasis on the
Session 2
description of morphological and syntactic structures. The functional approach, on the other
hand, is concerned with the use of language and the ways words and sentences are combined to
produce well-formed texts (Bennett 2003: 144).
Rule-based Machine Translation or RBMT
Also called knowledge-based machine translation, these are the earliest set of classical
methods used for machine translation.
• These translation systems are mainly based on linguistic

information about the source and target languages that
are derived from dictionaries and grammar covering the
characteristic elements of each language separately.
• Once we have input sentences in some source languages,
RBMT systems generally generate the translation to
output language based on the morphological, syntactic,
and semantic analysis of both the source and the target
languages involved in the translation tasks.
• The sub-approaches under RBMT systems are the direct
machine translation approach, the interlingual machine
translation approach, and the transfer-based machine
translation approach.
Example-based Machine Translation or EBMT
Example-based machine translation systems are trained from bilingual parallel corpora where
the sentence pairs contain sentences in one language with their translations into another.
• The foundational idea of example-based machine translation is the concept of translation

by analogy.
• The bilingual corpus with parallel texts serves as the main knowledge for an Example-
based machine translation system in which translation by analogy.
o A set of sentences in the source language are given in the example-based machine
translation system.
Session 2
Neural Machine Translation methods employ artificial intelligence techniques and, in

particular, rely upon neural network models which were originally based on the human brain to
build machine learning models with the end goal of translation and also further learning
languages,

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Session 2

Translation Studies and Translation Technology

✓ Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar: Deep structure/ Surface structure

✓ Skopos theory based on functional approaches: Shifting from linguistic-based translation to

Linguistic theories in machine translation systems

Rule-based Machine Translation or RBMT

• These translation systems are mainly based on linguistic

Example-based Machine Translation or EBMT

• The foundational idea of example-based machine translation is the concept of translation

Neural Machine Translation methods employ artificial intelligence techniques and, in

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