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)

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

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

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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.

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.

Book Chapters

Prelims

Introduction

1. Scholarly Communication

2. Machine Translation

3. Expanding the Reach of Knowledge Through Translation-Friendly Writing

4. Some Wider Implications of Using Machine Translation for Scholarly Communication

5. Towards a Framework for Machine Translation Literacy

References

Index