Enhancing Lexical Translation Consistency for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation

Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) has yielded attractive improvements. In this article, we systematically analyze the discourse phenomena in Chinese-to-English translation, and focus on the most obvious ones, namely lexical translation consistency. To alleviate the lexical inconsistency, we propose an effective approach that is aware of the words which need to be translated consistently and constrains the model to produce more consistent translations. Specifically, we first introduce a global context extractor to extract the document context and consistency context, respectively. Then, the two types of global context are integrated into a encoder enhancer and a decoder enhancer to improve the lexical translation consistency. We create a test set to evaluate the lexical consistency automatically. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly alleviate the lexical translation inconsistency. In addition, our approach can also substantially improve the translation quality compared to sentence-level Transformer.

A Corpus-Based Study on China English in the English Translation of Tao Te Ching

This study aims to examine the features of China English in the translation of Chinese classics by comparing two versions of Tao Te Ching based on corpus data. Of the two English versions, one was translated by a well-known Chinese translator—Xu Yuanchong, and the other was translated by an American sinologist—Arthur Waley. This study found that Xu’s translation indicates more features of China English compared with Waley’s translation according to three major aspects. First, Xu’s translation is more concise, employing fewer words to translate Tao Te Ching. Second, Xu’s version features fewer clauses and more clear sentences. Third, the paratactic nature of China English is reflected in Xu’s translation, which has more content words and less cohesiveness. This study reveals the characteristics of China English in translation texts and partly fills the research gaps regarding the quantitative research in this field.

An Institutional Rights Retention Strategy

Prorector for research and development at UiT The Arctic University of Norway informs about the institution's new Open Access Policy, in which Rights Retention takes a prominent place. All authors employed by UiT retain the rights to their peer-reviewed manuscripts, which can now be uploaded and be made available without any embargo period in the institutional repository, Munin, regardless of the policies of the publisher. In case an individual author refuses, (s)he is free to opt out, but no publisher shall have the right to force her/him to not make a manuscript publicly available in green open access through the institution's open repository. The original Norwegian policy document ("Prinsipper og retningslinjer for åpen tilgang til vitenskapelige publikasjoner ved UiT") is available through the website uit.no/publisering; an English translation will follow soon at en.uit.no/publishing.First published online: January 12, 2021

Wireless Network Access and Emotion Recognition of Online English Translation Teaching System from the Perspective of Artificial Intelligence

The research is aimed at verifying the application effect of the online automatic evaluation system in English translation teaching and at understanding the satisfaction of students with different feedback methods. The research uses three classes of human resource management majors in Xi’an Technological University as the research object and uses questionnaire survey and comparative experiment methods to compare and analyse the three feedback methods: teacher feedback, online automatic feedback, and teacher feedback combined with online automatic feedback. The research answers the following three questions: (1) will the three feedback methods affect students’ English translation performance? (2) Which of the three feedback methods will improve students’ English performance better? (3) What about students’ satisfaction with current feedback methods? The research results show that the significance value between the control group (CG) and the experimental group 1 (EG1) is 0.029, that between CG and the experimental group 2 (EG2) is 0.432, and that between EG1 and EG2 is 0.001. There are obvious differences in the posttest scores of the three groups of students. EG2 has the largest average posttest score, which is 9.8182; there is no obvious difference in posttest translation scores between CG and EG2. It indicates that “teacher feedback + online automatic feedback” and teacher feedback have the equivalent effect on improving students’ translation. The results of the questionnaire survey show that students have the highest degree of recognition of “teacher feedback + online automatic feedback.” The research is helpful for teachers to better understand the shortcomings in the translation teaching process, so that they can take effective measures against these problems in the follow-up teaching process to improve their teaching effect.

Introduction to Max Weber’s article ‘The “Threatening” of the Reich Constitution’

In May 1904 Max Weber published a short article in the Frankfurter Zeitung. It has gone unnoticed in the extensive Weber literature and it appears here in English translation for the first time. It is an important statement of Weber’s political views after his withdrawal from his active political engagement in the 1890s. He defends the Reich Constitution from attack and a possible coup d’état. He demands that the German Parliament (Reichstag) stand up to autocratic plans, closely linked to Emperor William II, to suppress democracy and voting rights. A constitutional conflict would require not a great statesman but an ‘unscrupulous idiot or a political adventurer’ who would undermine ‘all our institutions and the security of law for many generations’. The article marks the start (earlier than previously assumed in the literature) of Weber’s consistent championing of Parliament and democratic institutions.

A Corpus-Assisted Translation Study of Strategies Used in Rendering Culture-Bound Expressions in the Speeches of King Abdullah II

Translation is defined as transferring meaning and style from one language to another, taking the text producer's intended purpose and the audience culture into account. This paper uses a 256,000-word Arabic-English parallel corpus of the speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan from 1999 to 2015 to examine how some culture-bound expressions were translated from Arabic into English. To do so, two software packages were used, namely Wordsmith 6 and SketchEngine. Comparing the size of the Arabic corpus with its English counterpart using the wordlist tool of WS6, the researchers found that the number of words (tokens) in the English translation is more than the Arabic source text. However, the results showed that the Arabic language has more unique words, which means that it has more lexical density than its English counterpart. The researchers carried out a keyword analysis and compared the Arabic corpus with the ArTenTen corpus to identify the words that King Abdullah II saliently used in his speeches. Most of the keywords were culture-bound and related to the Jordanian context, which might be challenging to render. Using the parallel concordance tool and comparing the Arabic text with its English translation showed that the translator/s mainly resorted to the strategies of deletion, addition, substitution, and transliteration. The researchers recommend that further studies be conducted using the same approach but on larger corpora of other genres, such as legal, religious, press, and scientific texts.

Jacob Gordin: The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought

This article offers an English translation of an essay published in 1946 by Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), a Russian-Jewish philosopher of religion, who is considered the founding figure of the postwar Paris School of Jewish Thought (École de pensée juive de Paris). In “The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought”, Gordin presented a sweeping meta-narrative of the history of Jewish thought, formulated as a history of repeated “religious crises”, both existential and intellectual. In Gordin’s condensed narrative, these crises could be detected in the life and philosophy of the most canonical Jewish thinkers inside and outside the tradition: from Abraham the biblical patriarch to Hermann Cohen, through a diverse list including the rabbinical sage Elisha Ben-Abuyah, Philo, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza. In an introduction to Gordin’s text, I provide a brief biography, locate Gordin in existentialist discourse of the early postwar years, and discuss the affinities between Gordin’s “The Religious Crisis” and Levinas’s and Sartre’s early reflections on the Jewish question.