Impact of translation workflows with and without MT on textual characteristics in literary translation

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Daems, J, Ruffo, P., & Macken, L.
Editor
Bram Vanroy, Marie-Aude Lefer, Lieve Macken and Paola Ruffo
Series
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creative-text Translation and Technology
Pagination
63-70
Conference
1st workshop on Creative-text Translation and Technology (CTT), co-located with the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2024) (Sheffield, UK)
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Abstract

The use of machine translation is increasingly being explored for the translation of literary texts, but there is still a lot of uncertainty about the optimal translation workflow in these scenarios. While overall quality is quite good, certain textual characteristics can be different in a human translated text and a text produced by means of machine translation post-editing, which has been shown to potentially have an impact on reader perceptions and experience as well. In this study, we look at textual characteristics from short story translations from B.J. Novak's One more thing into Dutch. Twenty-three professional literary translators translated three short stories, in three different conditions: using Word, using the classic CAT tool Trados, and using a machine translation post-editing platform specifically designed for literary translation. We look at overall text characteristics (sentence length, type-token ratio, stylistic differences) to establish whether translation workflow has an impact on these features, and whether the three workflows lead to very different final translations or not.