Heike Przybyl


2023

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Simultaneous Interpreting as a Noisy Channel: How Much Information Gets Through
Maria Kunilovskaya | Heike Przybyl | Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Elke Teich
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

We explore the relationship between information density/surprisal of source and target texts in translation and interpreting in the language pair English-German, looking at the specific properties of translation (“translationese”). Our data comes from two bidirectional English-German subcorpora representing written and spoken mediation modes collected from European Parliament proceedings. Within each language, we (a) compare original speeches to their translated or interpreted counterparts, and (b) explore the association between segment-aligned sources and targets in each translation direction. As additional variables, we consider source delivery mode (read-out, impromptu) and source speech rate in interpreting. We use language modelling to measure the information rendered by words in a segment and to characterise the cross-lingual transfer of information under various conditions. Our approach is based on statistical analyses of surprisal values, extracted from n-gram models of our dataset. The analysis reveals that while there is a considerable positive correlation between the average surprisal of source and target segments in both modes, information output in interpreting is lower than in translation, given the same amount of input. Significantly lower information density in spoken mediated production compared to non-mediated speech in the same language can indicate a possible simplification effect in interpreting.

2022

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EPIC UdS - Creation and Applications of a Simultaneous Interpreting Corpus
Heike Przybyl | Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Katrin Menzel | Stefan Fischer | Elke Teich
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper, we describe the creation and annotation of EPIC UdS, a multilingual corpus of simultaneous interpreting for English, German and Spanish. We give an overview of the comparable and parallel, aligned corpus variants and explore various applications of the corpus. What makes EPIC UdS relevant is that it is one of the rare interpreting corpora that includes transcripts suitable for research on more than one language pair and on interpreting with regard to German. It not only contains transcribed speeches, but also rich metadata and fine-grained linguistic annotations tailored for diverse applications across a broad range of linguistic subfields.

2021

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Tracing variation in discourse connectives in translation and interpreting through neural semantic spaces
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Heike Przybyl | Yuri Bizzoni
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

In the present paper, we explore lexical contexts of discourse markers in translation and interpreting on the basis of word embeddings. Our special interest is on contextual variation of the same discourse markers in (written) translation vs. (simultaneous) interpreting. To explore this variation at the lexical level, we use a data-driven approach: we compare bilingual neural word embeddings trained on source-to-translation and source-to-interpreting aligned corpora. Our results show more variation of semantically related items in translation spaces vs. interpreting ones and a more consistent use of fewer connectives in interpreting. We also observe different trends with regard to the discourse relation types.

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Found in translation/interpreting: combining data-driven and supervised methods to analyse cross-linguistically mediated communication
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Yuri Bizzoni | Heike Przybyl | Elke Teich
Proceedings for the First Workshop on Modelling Translation: Translatology in the Digital Age