It is common for websites that contain User-Generated Text (UGT) to provide an automatic translation option to reach out to their linguistically diverse users. In such scenarios, the process of translating the users’ emotions is entirely automatic with no human intervention, neither for post-editing, nor for accuracy checking. In this paper, we assess whether automatic translation tools can be a successful real-life utility in transferring emotion in multilingual tweets. Our analysis shows that the mistranslation of the source tweet can lead to critical errors where the emotion is either completely lost or flipped to an opposite sentiment. We identify linguistic phenomena specific to Twitter data which pose a challenge in translation of emotions and show how frequent these features are in different language pairs. We also show that commonly-used quality metrics can lend false confidence in the performance of online MT tools specifically when the source emotion is distorted in telegraphic messages such as tweets.

Translation memory systems (TMS) are the main component of computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. They store translations allowing to save time by presenting translations on the database through matching of several types such as fuzzy matches, which are calculated by algorithms like the edit distance. However, studies have demonstrated the linguistic deficiencies of these systems and the difficulties in data retrieval or obtaining a high percentage of matching, especially after the application of syntactic and semantic transformations as the active/passive voice change, change of word order, substitution by a synonym or a personal pronoun, for instance. This paper presents the results of a pilot study where we analyze the qualitative and quantitative data of questionnaires conducted with professional translators of Spanish, French and Arabic in order to improve the effectiveness of TMS and explore all possibilities to integrate further linguistic processing from ten transformation types. The results are encouraging, and they allowed us to find out about the translation process itself; from which we propose a pre-editing processing tool to improve the matching and retrieving processes.

In recent years, the emergence of streaming platforms such as Netflix, HBO or Amazon Prime Video has reshaped the field of entertainment, which increasingly relies on subtitling, dubbing or voice-over modes. However, little is known about audiovisual translation when dealing with Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engines. This work-in-progress paper seeks to examine the English subtitles of the first episode of the popular Spanish Netflix series Cable Girls and the translated version generated by Google Translate and DeepL. Such analysis will help us determine whether there are significant linguistic differences that could lead to miscomprehension or cultural shocks. To this end, the corpus compiled consists of the Spanish script, the English subtitles available in Netflix and the translated version of the script. For the analysis of the data, errors have been classified following the DQF/MQM Error typology and have been evaluated with the automatic BLEU metric. Results show that NMT engines offer good-quality translations, which in turn may benefit translators working with audiovisual entertainment resources.

The development of Translation Technologies, like Translation Memory and Machine Translation, has completely changed the translation industry and translator’s workflow in the last decades. Nevertheless, TM and MT have been developed separately until very recently. This ongoing project will study the external integration of TM and MT, examining if the productivity and post-editing efforts of translators are higher or lower than using only TM. To this end, we will conduct an experiment where Translation students and professional translators will be asked to translate two short texts; then we will check the post-editing efforts (temporal, technical and cognitive efforts) and the quality of the translated texts.