Measuring success of your translation

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Anselm: sometime we use spacial metaphors (e.g. "thinking outside of the box"), which are difficult to translate automatically. Question: how to evaluate translation from the understanding point of view

Francis: Evaluation of machine translation

Francis: various text (literary text vs instructions of use) require different quality of translation. The best translated books I have seen have footnotes explaning cultural differences

Anselm: is there a book explaning best practices in translation?

Jerzy: translation studies is a developed area. The question is how to improve machine translation using this knowledge

Francis: you can tag challenging phrases as such so that they come up in machine translation

Jerzy: there are cultural differences e.g. between British and American English, less emphasis in the former, more in the latter. Problems with names: sometimes they have a differnt - opposite - meaning in another language

Anselm: sometimes we lack context information to understand some texts/translation, e.g. information about Iran. If people understood each other better there would be less animosity

Francis: keep in mind that we are in the Balkans where people understand each other perfectly well and it didn't make a difference

Jerzy: sometimes you need to retell an old story in a new ways translating the meaning more than words, e.g. Jesus of Montreal film and the New Testament, Romeo and Juliet theatre performances stages in modern environment

Anselm: translation across age groups

Francis: there is automatic summarisation (summaries) and textual entailment (comparing texts whether they cover similar issue)

Anselm: these tools can be used for picking up the best text on given topic for translation

Jerzy: hyperlinking could be a way of providing extra information needed in translation

Francis: wikipedia does this

Anselm: it is worth keeping the local taste of given language in translation. What would the world look like if we had a perfect translation tool?

Jerzy: in Hungarian you say that you are as many people as many languages you speak, put differently each language with its slightly different concepts provides you with a different perception of the world

Francis: there are different kinds of texts, from fully disambiguated (e.g. usee manuals) or texts written in controlled languages (e.g. aviation manuals) to texts with rich cultural background needed to understand/enjoy