Evaluating the effectiveness of machine translation of audio description: the results of two pilot studies in the English-Dutch language pair

The field of translation is undergoing various profound changes. On the one hand it is being thoroughly reshaped by the advent and constant improvement of new technologies. On the other hand, new forms of translation are starting to see the light of day in the wake of social and legal developments that require that products and content that are created, are accessible for everybody. One of these new forms of translation, is audio description (AD), a service that is aimed at making audiovisual content accessible to people with sight loss. New legislation requires that this content is accessible by 2025, which constitutes a tremendous task given the limited number of people that are at present trained as audio describers. A possible solution would be to use machine translation to translate existing audio descriptions into different languages. Since AD is characterized by short sentences and simple, concrete language, it could be a good candidate for machine translation. In the present study, we want to test this hypothesis for the English-Dutch language pair. Three 30 minute AD excerpts of different Dutch movies that were originally audio described in English, were translated into Dutch using DeepL. The translations were analysed using the harmonized DQF-MQM error typology and taking into account the specific multimodal nature of the source text and the intersemiotic dimension of the original audio description process. The analysis showed that the MT output had a relatively high error rate, particularly in the categories of Accuracy – mistranslation and Fluency – grammar. This seems to indicate that extensive post-editing will be needed, before the text can be used in a professional context.

Plaatsbepalingen: de Nederlanden in de wereld

The idea for this issue of Neerlandica Wratislaviensia arose from an interest in the Low Countries – their culture, literature, and language. This interest has translated into a number of various approaches to the concept of Nederlandsheid, seen not only through the eyes of the authorities on the Dutch language and literature from the University of Wroclaw, but also representatives of other scientific disciplines within the philology department of this university. Their focus, supplemented with a look at Low Countries from the perspective of Dutch and Flemish ‘insiders’, created an interesting mosaic presenting Low Countries in an exciting and accessible way. The articles of the 32nd issue of Neerlandica Wratislaviensia mention both the former Dutch colonies and the modern Low Countries seen through the eyes of Polish travelers; they describe authors’ auto-images and tools to make a literary work more attractive. Here we find fairy tales, non-fiction, and linguistic considerations. This number shows how small countries can strongly influence scientists’ knowledge.

Character Constellations

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks that affects the representation of social groups: their centrality, their communities, and their conflicts. While reading individual novels in light of emerging statistical patterns, combining the formal methods of social network analysis with the interpretive tools of narratology, this study shows how central societal themes such as (in)equality and emancipation, integration and segregation, and social mobility and class struggle are foregrounded, replicated, or distorted in the Dutch novel. Showcasing what character-based critiques of literary representation gain by integrating data-driven methods into the practice of critical close reading, Character Constellations contributes to societal debates on cultural representation and identity and the role fiction and art have in those debates.

Functional and Facilitating: A Look into the Promotion and Standardization of Dutch as the Official Language in the Netherlands

Dutch society is open and international-oriented. A long standing tradition of world trade has contributed to the English proficiency of Dutch citizens. This, however, brings challenges to the status of Dutch as the national official language in the Netherlands. This paper takes the framework of national language capacity building proposed by Wen Qiufang and inspects the Dutch language policy in official language promotion and standardization. Results of the research show that coming from other languages that undermines the position of Dutch as national official language is gradually increasing. The Dutch solution is to put facilitating measures in place and to develop functional tools to support language users and learners. This solution can be valuable for the building of European multilingual landscape with its facilitating feature.

Spaces of Privacy in Early Modern Dutch Egodocuments

While the word 'privacy' itself only started to appear in the Dutch language in the newspapers of the nineteenth-century, Michaël Green argues that the idea underlying it was already developing in the early seventeenth century in Dutch contexts. In his article, Green examines, first, transformations that occurred in the seventeenth century in architectural idealizations of the family house, where plans for corridors started to appear alongside locks and separate rooms. Then, based on several examples of egodocuments - among them the diaries of the schoolmaster David Beck and an autobiographical piece by Maria de Neufville - he focuses on how members of the middling and elite classes wrote about their own practical experiences of spatial and emotional privacy.

Linking the Dictionary of Old Dutch to A Thesaurus of Old English

At the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Dutch Language Institute), DiaMaNT, a diachronic semantic computational lexicon of Dutch, is being developed, based on the scholarly historical dictionaries of Dutch. The main purpose of this lexicon is to enhance text accessibility and foster research in the development of concepts. This article explores the feasibility of enriching DiaMaNT with an existing semantic classification by linking a subset of the vocabulary of the Dictionary of Old Dutch to A Thesaurus of Old English.

Character Constellations

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks that affects the representation of social groups: their centrality, their communities, and their conflicts. While reading individual novels in light of emerging statistical patterns, combining the formal methods of social network analysis with the interpretive tools of narratology, this study shows how central societal themes such as (in)equality and emancipation, integration and segregation, and social mobility and class struggle are foregrounded, replicated, or distorted in the Dutch novel. Showcasing what character-based critiques of literary representation gain by integrating data-driven methods into the practice of critical close reading, Character Constellations contributes to societal debates on cultural representation and identity and the role fiction and art have in those debates.

De wind in de zeilen hebben – “chwytać wiatr w żagle”. Nederlandse en Poolse metaforen uit de scheepvaart in vergelijking

This article underlines the great impact of navigation on the Dutch language. It contains a large number of Dutch maritime expressions and other terms derived from navigation and used in everyday language. The main aim of this article is to propose two different divisions of Dutch maritime idioms, which may clarify their figurative meaning. Furthermore, the author compares Dutch maritime metaphors to Polish examples, and eventually makes an attempt to answer the question whether Dutch maritime expressions were borrowed by Polish. There are many different Dutch loanwords (technical terminology) in Polish connected to navigation (eg. ship equipment elements).

Persiflages van “Jiskefet” als lesondersteuning

The satirical television series Jiskefet ran from 1990 to 2005 at the VPRO channel. While the popular satirical television series Kooten & De Bie focused more on political parody, Jiskefet was more absurdist and mainly made parodies of certain subcultures. In this article, I want to look at how these timeless parodies can be used as course materials. Not only is Jiskefet itself part of Dutch culture, but the parodies also magnify typical Dutch cultural elements. Examples include student associations, the culture of voluntary work, nursing homes that often appear in the news, and the office culture with the inevitable lunch box and office humor. Furthermore, the parodies constitute interesting linguistic material in the form of neologisms, which have enriched the Dutch language and will also be discussed here. Finally, the fact that stereotypes and prejudices are used in parodies offers the possibility of discussing the subject with students.