Automated translation of a literary work: a pilot study

Laurent Besacier, Lane Schwartz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Current machine translation (MT) techniques are continuously improving. In specific areas, post-editing (PE) can enable the production of high-quality translations relatively quickly. But is it feasible to translate a literary work (fiction, short story, etc) using such an MT+PE pipeline? This paper offers an initial response to this question. An essay by the American writer Richard Powers, currently not available in French, is automatically translated and post-edited and then revised by non-professional translators. In addition to presenting experimental evaluation results of the MT+PE pipeline (MT system used, automatic evaluation), we also discuss the quality of the translation output from the perspective of a panel of readers (who read the translated short story in French, and answered a survey afterwards). Finally, some remarks of the official French translator of R. Powers, requested on this occasion, are given at the end of this article.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL HLT 2015 - 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, CLFL 2015
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages114-122
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781941643365
StatePublished - 2015
Event4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, CLFL 2015 at the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2015 - Denver, United States
Duration: Jun 4 2015 → …

Publication series

NameNAACL HLT 2015 - 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, CLFL 2015

Conference

Conference4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, CLFL 2015 at the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period6/4/15 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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