In both the translation industry and translation education, analytic and systematic assessment of translations plays a vital role. However, due to lack of a scheme for describing differences between translations, such assessment has been realized only in an ad-hoc manner. There is prior work on a scheme for describing differences between translations, but it has coverage and objectivity issues. To alleviate these issues and realize more fine-grained analyses, we developed an improved scheme by referring to diverse types of translations and adopting hierarchical linguistic units for analysis, taking English-to-Japanese translation as an example.

The multilingualization of terminology is an essential step in the translation pipeline, to ensure the correct transfer of domain-specific concepts. Many institutions and language service providers construct and maintain multilingual terminologies, which constitute important assets. However, the curation of such multilingual resources requires significant human effort; though automatic multilingual term extraction methods have been proposed so far, they are of limited success as term translation cannot be satisfied by simply conveying meaning, but requires the terminologists and domain experts’ knowledge to fit the term within the existing terminology. Here we propose a method to encode the structural property of a term by aligning their embeddings using graph convolutional networks trained from separate languages. We observe that the structural information can augment the semantic methods also explored in this work, and recognize the unique nature of terminologies allows our method to fully take advantage and produce superior results.

Terms represent concepts, which consist of conceptual characteristics. In actual concept-term formation, which is done by researchers, the process is in reverse: conceptual elements/characteristics are consolidated to form concepts, which are represented by terms. As concepts do not exist on the fly, what we may call termino-conceptual system provides scaffolding in this process. Terminologists, both in practice and in research, do not only collect and list terms but also analyse, describe and define terms and systematise terminologies. To carry out these tasks, terminologists must refer to conceptual systems, to the extent that they contribute to systematising terminologies; terminologists thus also deal with the sphere of termino-conceptual system. In this paper, we consolidate the status of termino-conceptual sphere and propose a way to characterise the structure of termino-conceptual system by using entropy. The entropic characterisation of English terminologies of six domain, i.e. agriculture, botany, chemistry, computer science, physics and psychology are presented.

Consistency is a crucial requirement in text annotation. It is especially important in educational applications, as lack of consistency directly affects learners’ motivation and learning performance. This paper presents a quality assessment scheme for English-to-Japanese translations produced by learner translators at university. We constructed a revision typology and a decision tree manually through an application of the OntoNotes method, i.e., an iteration of assessing learners’ translations and hypothesizing the conditions for consistent decision making, as well as re-organizing the typology. Intrinsic evaluation of the created scheme confirmed its potential contribution to the consistent classification of identified erroneous text spans, achieving visibly higher Cohen’s kappa values, up to 0.831, than previous work. This paper also describes an application of our scheme to an English-to-Japanese translation exercise course for undergraduate students at a university in Japan.

Previous work on the epistemology of fact-checking indicated the dilemma between the needs of binary answers for the public and ambiguity of political discussion. Determining concepts represented by terms in political discourse can be considered as a Word-Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task. The analysis of political discourse, however, requires identifying precise concepts of terms from relatively small data. This work attempts to provide a basic framework for revealing concepts of terms in political discourse with explicit contextual information. The framework consists of three parts: 1) extracting important terms, 2) generating concordance for each term with stipulative definitions and explanations, and 3) agglomerating similar information of the term by hierarchical clustering. Utterances made by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in the Diet of Japan are used to examine our framework. Importantly, we revealed the conceptual inconsistency of the term Sonritsu-kiki-jitai. The framework was proved to work, but only for a small number of terms due to lack of explicit contextual information.

In this paper, we propose a method of augmenting existing bilingual terminologies. Our method belongs to a “generate and validate” framework rather than extraction from corpora. Although many studies have proposed methods to find term translations or to augment terminology within a “generate and validate” framework, few has taken full advantage of the systematic nature of terminologies. A terminology of a domain represents the conceptual system of the domain fairly systematically, and we contend that making use of the systematicity fully will greatly contribute to the effective augmentation of terminologies. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel method to generate bilingual term candidates by using existing terminologies and delving into their systematicity. Experiments have shown that our method can generate much better term candidate pairs than the existing method and give improved performance for terminology augmentation.

This paper presents the construction and evaluation of Japanese and English controlled bilingual terminologies that are particularly intended for controlled authoring and machine translation with special reference to the Japanese municipal domain. Our terminologies are constructed by extracting terms from municipal website texts, and the term variations are controlled by defining preferred and proscribed terms for both the source Japanese and the target English. To assess the coverage of the terms/concepts in the municipal domain and validate the quality of the control, we employ a quantitative extrapolation method that estimates the potential vocabulary size. Using Large-Number-of-Rare-Event (LNRE) modelling, we compare two parameters: (1) uncontrolled and controlled and (2) Japanese and English. The results show that our terminologies currently cover about 45–65% of the terms and 50–65% of the concepts in the municipal domain, and are well controlled. The detailed analysis of growth patterns of terminologies also provides insight into the extent to which we can enlarge the terminologies within the realistic range.

The paper introduces a web-based authoring support system, MuTUAL, which aims to help writers create multilingual texts. The highlighted feature of the system is that it enables machine translation (MT) to generate outputs appropriate to their functional context within the target document. Our system is operational online, implementing core mechanisms for document structuring and controlled writing. These include a topic template and a controlled language authoring assistant, linked to our statistical MT system.

In this paper we report a way of constructing a translation corpus that contains not only source and target texts, but draft and final versions of target texts, through the translation hosting site Minna no Hon'yaku (MNH). We made MNH publicly available on April 2009. Since then, more than 1,000 users have registered and over 3,500 documents have been translated, as of February 2010, from English to Japanese and from Japanese to English. MNH provides an integrated translation-aid environment, QRedit, which enables translators to look up high-quality dictionaries and Wikipedia as well as to search Google seamlessly. As MNH keeps translation logs, a corpus consisting of source texts, draft translations in several versions, and final translations is constructed naturally through MNH. As of 7 February, 764 documents with multiple translation versions are accumulated, of which 110 are edited by more than one translators. This corpus can be used for self-learning by inexperienced translators on MNH, and potentially for improving machine translation.

In human translation, translators first make draft translations and then modify and edit them. In the case of experienced translators, this process involves the use of wide-ranging expert knowledge, which has mostly remained implicit so far. Describing the difference between draft and final translations, therefore, should contribute to making this knowledge explicit. If we could clarify the expert knowledge of translators, hopefully in a computationally tractable way, we would be able to contribute to the automatic notification of awkward translations to assist inexperienced translators, improving the quality of MT output, etc. Against this backdrop, we have started constructing a corpus that indicates patterns of modification between draft and final translations made by human translators. This paper reports on our progress to date.

In this paper we evaluate the Basic Travel Expression Corpus (BTEC), developed by ATR (Advanced Telecommunication Research Laboratory), Japan. BTEC was specifically developed as a wide-coverage, consistent corpus containing basic Japanese travel expressions with English counterparts, for the purpose of providing basic data for the development of high quality speech translation systems. To evaluate the corpus, we introduce a quantitative method for evaluating the sufficiency of qualitatively well-defined corpora, on the basis of LNRE methods that can estimate the potential growth patterns of various sparse data by fitting various skewed distributions such as the Zipfian group of distributions, lognormal distribution, and inverse Gauss-Poisson distribution to them. The analyses show the coverage of lexical items of BTEC vis-a-vis the possible targets implicitly defined by the corpus itself, and thus provides basic insights into strategies for enhancing BTEC in future.