Multilingualism as International Marketing Strategy

Market globalization has made multilingual marketing communications a sine qua none for most transnational businesses. Exploring new foreign markets has thus meant translating and localizing marketing communications, so as to enable foreign consumers to have the kind of experience that may spur them into being favorable to the products or services on promotion. Conscious of this imperative, many Nigerian companies have embarked on multilingual packaging as a key component of their international marketing strategies. Although such a language-based tactic has enormous potential, Nigerian companies' use of multilingual packaging is confronted to a multitude of problems. This chapter explores four of such problems, including mis-translations (of packages), partial translation, typographic and design errors, and companies' adherence to the myth stating that English is the language of business. To address these challenges, the chapter recommends non or reduced reliance on automatic translation and resorting to the services of a professional translator, “transcreators,” and experienced marketers.

Back to the Basics

Health literacy is a critical foundation that needs to be considered prior to the development and deployment of consumer e-health technologies. The authors indicate the problems associated with the lack of effective health literacy strategies in current consumer e-health interventions and then present a patient-centered, disease-specific, task-relevant, and contextualized health literacy approach. The goal of such an approach is to help patients better understand their illnesses make sense of their health data, make informed decisions, and more effectively manage their health conditions. The authors make five recommendations concerning health literacy in order to make e-health interventions effective. They also describe next-generation health literacy interventions that take advantage of emerging technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, automatic translation, and augmented reality. Finally, the authors point out a research and development direction towards an intelligent, integrated, and connected consumer e-health solution.

Errors in machine translation from German into Russian (based on articles of German-language media and their translations)

The article is devoted to the study of errors and inaccuracies made by machine translation systems. The reasons for the appearance of errors of various types in the texts of machine translations of German-language articles of well-known mass media into Russian, made by popular translation programs, are analyzed. A classification of errors is given. The lexical-semantic and lexical-stylistic, normative-usual, grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors are highlighted. Typical “weaknesses” of machine translation from German into Russian are revealed, which should be paid attention to during post-editing of the text of such a translation. It is pointed out that the analysis of typical errors in automatic translation can also be taken into account in the process of improving the algorithm of their work by the developers of machine translation systems.

Automatic Translation of Medical Information Based on Text Feature Recognition

In order to improve the effect of the medical information automatic translation system, based on the text feature recognition technology of medical image, this paper constructs an automatic translation system that can recognize medical images. On the basis of the medical information image retrieval based on the combination of text information and visual information, this paper uses automatic image annotation technology and semantic similarity calculation method to extract the text and semantic features of medical information images. Then, this paper uses the inherent multi-information fusion capability of the Bayesian inference network to fuse the text features of medical information images and the semantic features of image content together to realize medical information image retrieval. Finally, this paper designs experiments to test the performance of the medical information automatic translation system. The research shows that the system constructed in this paper has certain effects.

Development of translation skills among Chinese students in the process of professional training of linguists majoring in “Russian as a foreign language”

Перевод — комплексная дисциплина, требующая систематического развития всех видов речевой деятельности и предполагающая сложную поэтапную работу с учащимися. Особенность обучения переводу состоит в том, что образовательный процесс происходит в условиях двуязычия и осуществляется средствами двух языков. Формирование навыков перевода происходит в процессе выполнения сложного комплекса упражнений, учитывающих специфику переводческой деятельности: микрореферирование, перевод-пересказ, реферативный письменный и устный перевод, составление аннотации и др. Необходимо использование упражнений, ориентированных на развитие аналитических навыков: определение достоверности перевода, выбор подходящих вариантов перевода, сопоставительное изучение переводческих ошибок и др. В тренировочный комплекс включаются упражнения на переводческие трансформации: перевод с применением приемов калькирования, конкретизации, генерализации, антонимического перевода и др. Совершенствование переводческих навыков учащихся происходит одновременно с формированием лингвокультурологической компетенции, знакомством с языковой картиной мира русских. При разработке заданий целесообразной представляется работа с культурно-специфическими словами, «ложными друзьями переводчика», что способствует расширению языковых и фоновых знаний студентов, знакомству с реалиями и формированию необходимых переводческих навыков и умений. Основными задачами обучения являются: а) знание языкового материала, доведенное до уровня автоматического перевода; б) формирование фоновой эрудиции переводчика. Translation is a complex discipline that requires systematic development of all types of speech activity and involves complex step-by-step work with students. The specific feature of teaching translation is that the educational process occurs in a bilingual environment and applies two languages. Translation skills are formed in the process of performing a complex set of exercises that take into account the peculiarities of translation activities. It is necessary to use exercises focused on the development of analytical skills, for instance, determining the reliability of the translation, selecting the appropriate translation options, and comparative study of translation errors. The training complex includes exercises for translation transformations, for example, loan translation, concretization, generalization, and antonymic translation. The ability to operate with a large amount of information develops on the basis of tasks that train memory, such as micro-referencing, translation-retelling, abstract translating and interpreting, and writing summaries. In the process of training translators, special attention is paid to the formation of background erudition. The improvement of students' translation skills is concurrent with developing linguistic and culturological competence along with learning the linguistic picture of the Russian world. When designing assignments, it seems expedient to work with culturally sensitive words and “false friends of the translator”, which contributes to the growth of the students’ linguistic and background knowledge, exploration of the realities and the formation of the necessary translation skills and abilities. The main objectives of training are knowledge of the language material, brought to the level of automatic translation as well as the formation of the background erudition of the translator.

Design and Testing of Automatic Machine Translation System Based on Chinese-English Phrase Translation

With the development of linguistics and the improvement of computer performance, the effect of machine translation is getting better and better, and it is widely used. The automatic expression translation method based on the Chinese-English machine takes short sentences as the basic translation unit and makes full use of the order of short sentences. Compared with word-based statistical machine translation methods, the effect is greatly improved. The performance of machine translation is constantly improving. This article aims to study the design of phrase-based automatic machine translation systems by introducing machine translation methods and Chinese-English phrase translation, explore the design and testing of machine automatic translation systems based on the combination of Chinese-English phrase translation, and explain the role of machine automatic translation in promoting the development of translation. In this article, through the combination of machine translation experiments and machine automatic translation system design methods, the design and testing of machine automatic translation systems based on Chinese-English phrase translation combinations are studied to cultivate people's understanding of language, knowledge, and intelligence and then help solve other problems. Language processing issues promote the development of corpus linguistics. The experimental results in this article show that when the Chinese-English phrase translation probability table is changed from 82% to 51%, the BLEU translation evaluation system for the combination of Chinese-English phrases is improved. Automatic machine translation saves time and energy of translation work, which shows that machine translation shows its advantages due to its short development cycle and easy processing of large-scale corpora.

The Role of Machine Translation Quality Estimation in the Post-Editing Workflow

As Machine Translation (MT) becomes increasingly ubiquitous, so does its use in professional translation workflows. However, its proliferation in the translation industry has brought about new challenges in the field of Post-Editing (PE). We are now faced with a need to find effective tools to assess the quality of MT systems to avoid underpayments and mistrust by professional translators. In this scenario, one promising field of study is MT Quality Estimation (MTQE), as this aims to determine the quality of an automatic translation and, indirectly, its degree of post-editing difficulty. However, its impact on the translation workflows and the translators’ cognitive load is still to be fully explored. We report on the results of an impact study engaging professional translators in PE tasks using MTQE. To assess the translators’ cognitive load we measure their productivity both in terms of time and effort (keystrokes) in three different scenarios: translating from scratch, post-editing without using MTQE, and post-editing using MTQE. Our results show that good MTQE information can improve post-editing efficiency and decrease the cognitive load on translators. This is especially true for cases with low MT quality.

Combining Logic and Natural Language Processing to Support Investment Management

This paper presents an application that we developed to assist users with the creation of an investment profile for the selection of financial assets. It consists of a natural language interface, an automatic translation to a declarative FO(.) knowledge base, and the IDP reasoning engine with multiple forms of logical inference. The application speeds up the investment profile creation process, and reduces the considerable inherent operational risk linked to the creation of investment profiles