Advanced
search

Prelims

Lynne Bowker (University of Ottawa, Canada)
Jairo Buitrago Ciro (University of Ottawa, Canada)

Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community

ISBN: 978-1-78756-722-1, eISBN: 978-1-78756-721-4

Publication date: 1 May 2019

pdf (1.7 MB) ePub (1.1 MB) Article view Figure view Cited (3) cite article

Citation

Bowker, L. and Ciro, J.B. (2019), "Prelims", Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. i-xiii. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78756-721-420191001

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited

Half Title Page

Machine Translation and Global Research

Title Page

Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community

BY

Lynne Bowker

University of Ottawa, Canada

Jairo Buitrago Ciro

University of Ottawa, Canada

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2019

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permission service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78756-722-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-721-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-723-8 (Epub)

Dedication

Dear families: Here is the book.

Contents

List of Tables xi
About the Authors xiii
Introduction 1
  Why this book? 1
  Who is this book for? 2
  What’s in this book? 6
1. Scholarly Communication 7
  What is scholarly communication? 7
    From a scientific boom to a scientific literature boom 8
  The rise of English(es) as the international language of scientific communication 9
  Scholarly publishing 11
    English for research publication purposes 13
    Translation of scientific research 14
    Convenience editing and translation in a gig economy 18
    Publishing strategies and their pros and cons: A summary 20
  Machine translation and scientific research: Horses for courses 22
    Parlez-vous le français-robot? The limits of machine translation for knowledge dissemination 22
    From post-editing to self-post-editing: A promising way forward? 25
    A helping hand when searching for information? 27
    A “good-enough” solution? The potential of machine translation for information assimilation 29
  An emerging need: Machine translation literacy 32
  Key points from this chapter 35
  To find out more about… 36
2. Machine Translation 37
  A brief history of machine translation 37
  Just follow the rules! Rule-based machine translation 39
  With friends like statistics, who needs linguistics? Corpus-based approaches to machine translation 42
  What’s next? The rise of neural machine translation 44
  It’s all so confusing! The ambiguity of language and the challenges it poses for machine translation 46
    Homonymy and polysemy 46
    Word category ambiguity 46
    Structural ambiguity 47
    Anaphora, idioms, and so on! 48
  Change the input, change the output: Machine translation and controlled languages 49
  Key points from this chapter 53
  To find out more about... 54
3. Expanding the Reach of Knowledge Through Translation-Friendly Writing 55
  Collective action for the common good 55
  Academic writing style: Set in stone or open to change? 60
  What is the purpose of translation-friendly writing? 62
  Ten guidelines for translation-friendly writing 63
    Use short sentences 64
    Use the active voice rather than the passive voice 64
    Avoid long noun strings or modifier stacks 65
    Use relative pronouns such as “that” and “which” 65
    Avoid wordiness 66
    Use nouns instead of personal pronouns 66
    Use terminology consistently 67
    Choose unambiguous words 68
    Avoid abbreviated forms 68
    Avoid idiomatic expressions, humor, and cultural references 69
  Taking the leap? 71
    Abstracts 71
  Transforming an abstract into a translation-friendly text: An extended example 72
    Some notes on post-editing 76
    Key points from this chapter 77
    To find out more about... 78
4. Some Wider Implications of Using Machine Translation for Scholarly Communication 79
  Just because we can use machine translation, does that mean that we should ? 79
    To translate, or not to translate? 80
    Looking beyond the machine 82
    Privacy concerns 84
  Key points from this chapter 85
  To find out more about... 86
5. Towards a Framework for Machine Translation Literacy 87
  Machine translation literacy: A working definition 87
  A preliminary framework for machine translation literacy instruction 88
    Module 1. Why think about machine translation in the context of scholarly communication? 89
    Module 2. Overview of machine translation systems 90
    Module 3. Translation-friendly writing and editing 90
    Module 4. Self-post-editing machine translation output 91
  Who will deliver the instruction? 92
  Key points from this chapter 93
  Concluding remarks 95
References 97
Index 105

List of Tables

Table 1. Comparison of the cost of professional translation services in 2018. 17
Table 2. Summary of the main publication strategies available to researchers who have English as an additional language. 21
Table 3. Typical and atypical sentence constructions for weather forecasts. 50
Table 4. Examples from the bnc 1994 and the bnc 2014 that illustrate how academic writing is becoming more colloquial. 61
Table 5. Description of modifications applied to the text to make it translation-friendly. 74

About the Authors

Lynne Bowker holds a PhD in Language Engineering from the the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in the United Kingdom. She is a Full Professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, where she holds a cross-appointment between the School of Translation and Interpretation and the School of Information Studies. She is the author of Computer-Aided Translation Technology (2002, University of Ottawa Press) and co-author, with Jennifer Pearson, of Working with Specialized Language: A Practical Guide to Using Corpora (2002, Routledge).

Jairo Buitrago Ciro holds an ALA-accredited Master of Information Studies from the University of Ottawa in Canada. He has previously worked as an Academic Librarian at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Canada and as the Director of the Library at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Colombia. He is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Electronic Business at the University of Ottawa.

Manage cookies

We’re listening — tell us what you think

Join us on our journey