Machine Translation versus Human Translation: The Case of English-to-Chinese Translation of Relative Clauses

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Zhuqing Wang and Seung-Ah Lee. 2018. Machine Translation versus Human Translation: The Case of English-to-Chinese Translation of Relative Clauses. Language and Information 22.1, 175-201. This paper compares translations done by professional human translators (as manifested in the Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus) and machine translation sproduced by Google Translate (with English as the source language and Simplified Chinese as the target language). Capitalizing on the branching direction of these two languages, we investigated translation strategies of restrictive relative clauses by focusing on which-relatives. The specific objectives of the study were to (a) extract relevant data from a parallel corpus; (b) assess machine translation quality; and (c) highlight the similarities and dissimilarities between corpus outputs and machine translation outputs. Of the 147 test materials, 115 Google Translate outputs (78.2%) were rated as ‘successful’ or ‘acceptable’. No significant differences were found between the degree of success in machine translations and linguistic factors (e.g., the active or passive voice in relativeclauses). This finding confirms that linguistic knowledge is not required when using statistical machine translation (SMT) such as Google Translate. Another noteworthy finding was that Google Translate did not use the least frequently occurring translation strategy in the parallel corpus. This is not surprising given that SMT systems greatly rely on parallel corpora for training statistical translation models.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 조수연, "타동성 교체 구문을 활용한 구글 번역기의 영한 번역 평가" 언어연구소 (61) : 111-140, 2013

2 전종섭, "웹기반 영한 번역을 위한 중간 언어의 효율성 연구" 통번역연구소 17 (17): 201-229, 2013

3 박영란, "영한번역에서의 시제의 등가성과 기계번역과의 비교: 영어 현재진행형을 중심으로" 한국통번역교육학회 15 (15): 165-194, 2017

4 최인철, "명사구 접근성 위계와 영어 관계절 습득의 관련성 연구" 현대문법학회 (57) : 267-292, 2009

5 마승혜, "기계화되기 어려운 인간 능력과 문학번역 능력 비교․고찰 및 논의" 통번역연구소 21 (21): 55-77, 2017

6 Hampshire, Stephen, "Translation and the Internet: Evaluating the Quality of Free Online Machine Translators" 17 : 197-209, 2010

7 Jiang, Yiping, "Translation Strategies of Restrictive Relative Clauses Introduced by “Preposition + Relativizer”" 6 : 16-20, 1987

8 Cowan, Ron, "The Teacher’s Grammar of English" Cambridge University Press 2008

9 Lust, Barbara, "The Structure of Coordination in First Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence for a Universal" 17 (17): 49-83, 1984

10 Ting, Jen, "The Nature of the Particle SUO in Mandarin Chinese" 12 (12): 121-139, 2003

11 Johnson, "The Economist’s Language Blog"

12 Huddleston, Rodney, "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" Cambridge University Press 2002

13 "The Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus"

14 Hearne, Mary, "Statistical Machine Translation: A Guide for Linguists and Translators" 5 (5): 205-226, 2011

15 Callison-Burch, Chris, "Re-evaluating the Role of BLEU in Machine Translation Research" The European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 249-256, 2006

16 Fiederer, Rebecca, "Quality and Machine Translation: A Realistic Objective?" 11 : 52-74, 2009

17 Yule, George, "Oxford Practice Grammar" Oxford University Press 2006

18 Farrús, "Overcoming Statistical Machine Translation Limitations : Error Analysis and Proposed Solutions for the Catalan-Spanish Language Pair" 45 (45): 181-208, 2011

19 Yin, Baoshu, "On the Translation Strategy of English Relative Clauses" 1 : 12-19, 1963

20 Oraki, Abouzar, "On the Translation Quality of Google Translate: With a Concentration on Adjectives" 1 (1): 62-73, 2015

21 Chen, Qimin, "On Translating English Attributive Clauses into Chinese" 4 (4): 35-40, 2010

22 Keenan, Edward L., "Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar" 8 (8): 63-99, 1977

23 Li, Charles N., "Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar" University of California Press 1981

24 Biber, Douglas, "Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English" Longman 1999

25 Vendler, Zeno, "Linguistics in Philosophy" Cornell University Press 1967

26 Haspelmath, Martin, "Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume II: Complex Constructions" Cambridge University Press 2007

27 Hwang, Young-Sook, "Introducing the Basis of Statistical Machine Translation and Research Trends" 25 : 89-114, 2010

28 Fan, Deyi, "Initial Discussion of Translation Strategies of English Relative Clauses" 4 : 11-15, 1980

29 Saffari, Mitra, "Evaluation of Machine Translation (Google Translate vs. Bing Translator) from English into Persian across Academic Fields" 7 (7): 429-442, 2017

30 Levin, Beth, "English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation" The University of Chicago Press 1993

31 Chang, Pi-Chuan, "Disambiguating “DE”for Chinese-English Machine Translation" The Association for Computational Linguistics 215-223, 2009

32 McEnery, Tony, "Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book" Routledge 2006

33 Goodall, Grant, "Coordination in Syntax. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics"

34 Sun, Chaofen, "Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction" Cambridge University Press 2006

35 Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, "Chinese and English Relative Clauses: Processing Constraints and Typological Consequences" The Ohio State University 1 : 191-199, 2011

36 Hardie, Andrew, "CQPweb ― Combining Power, Flexibility and Usability in a Corpus Analysis Tool" 17 (17): 380-409, 2012

37 Papineni, Kishore, "BLEU: A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation" The Association for Computational Linguistics 311-318, 2002

38 Song, Xingyi, "BLEU Deconstructed: Designing a Better MT Evaluation Metric" 4 (4): 29-44, 2013

39 Aiken, Milam, "An Analysis of Google Translate Accuracy" 16 (16): 2011

40 Kroulek, Alison, "11 Google Translate Facts You Should Know"