Böcker i Text, Translation, Computational Processing [TTCP]-serien

The series serves to propagate investigations into language usage, especially with respect to computational support. This includes all forms of text handling activity, not only interlingual translations, but also conversions carried out in response to different communicative tasks. Among the major topics are problems of text transfer and the interplay between human and machine activities.

Casting light on the interplay between language and domain-specific knowledge, this book brings together ideas and approaches from cognitive linguistics and psychology, explaining how language works.

The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text. The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.

It is generally agreed that knowledge plays an important role in translation and interpreting and that it should therefore be of central concern to studies in this field.

The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory.The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated.

Moving beyond the notion of "content" in thinking about language and translation, this book is an attempt to face the demands of translation and multilingual text production by modelling texts as configurations of multidimensional meanings, rather than as containers of "content".

The main concern of this book is to look at the communication of conceptual structures. It investigates how speakers rely on the same cognitive dispositions in three different areas of transfer. These areas look at, metonymies and metaphors, intercultural communication and expert-lay communication.

Perspectives on Translation Quality

Among the topics discussed in this interdisciplinary volume are: technological knowledge in text and context in combination with cognitive and social conditions, knowledge transfer beyond languages and cultures, the influence of the world wide web on social communities.

Research in Natural Language Processing is critically dependent on adequate electronic text resources and a rich representation of lexical knowledge. This title presents a collection of papers, selected from contributions to the 9th conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2008), that explores their dynamic interaction.

The book aims to encourage multiple perspective reading attitudes, which are meant to trigger and inspire new ways of viewing and engineering information. An innovative linguistic theory as well as a new model for text generation and text understanding are illustrated. The linguistic theory, enhanced by a novel artificial intelligence-based approach, will help readers to acquire information engineering skills and may be implemented in the design of knowledge management systems.