Gutenberg Goes Neural: Comparing Features of Dutch Human Translations with Raw Neural Machine Translation Outputs in a Corpus of English Literary Classics

Due to the growing success of neural machine translation (NMT), many have started to question its applicability within the field of literary translation. In order to grasp the possibilities of NMT, we studied the output of the neural machine system of Google Translate (GNMT) and DeepL when applied to four classic novels translated from English into Dutch. The quality of the NMT systems is discussed by focusing on manual annotations, and we also employed various metrics in order to get an insight into lexical richness, local cohesion, syntactic, and stylistic difference. Firstly, we discovered... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Rebecca Webster
Margot Fonteyne
Arda Tezcan
Lieve Macken
Joke Daems
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
Reihe/Periodikum: Informatics, Vol 7, Iss 32, p 32 (2020)
Verlag/Hrsg.: MDPI AG
Schlagwörter: literary machine translation / neural machine translation / quality assessment / lexical richness / cohesion / syntactic divergence / Information technology / T58.5-58.64
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26628928
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics7030032

Due to the growing success of neural machine translation (NMT), many have started to question its applicability within the field of literary translation. In order to grasp the possibilities of NMT, we studied the output of the neural machine system of Google Translate (GNMT) and DeepL when applied to four classic novels translated from English into Dutch. The quality of the NMT systems is discussed by focusing on manual annotations, and we also employed various metrics in order to get an insight into lexical richness, local cohesion, syntactic, and stylistic difference. Firstly, we discovered that a large proportion of the translated sentences contained errors. We also observed a lower level of lexical richness and local cohesion in the NMTs compared to the human translations. In addition, NMTs are more likely to follow the syntactic structure of a source sentence, whereas human translations can differ. Lastly, the human translations deviate from the machine translations in style.