Conference article

We report on a study of the specific linguistic properties of cross-linguistically mediated communication, comparing written and spoken translation (simultaneous interpreting) in the domain of European Parliament discourse. Specifically, we compare translations and interpreting with target language original texts/speeches in terms of (a) predefined features commonly used for translationese detection, and (b) features derived in a data-driven fashion from translation and interpreting corpora. For the latter, we use n-gram language models combined with relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence). We set up a number of classification tasks comparing translations with comparable texts originally written in the target language and interpreted speeches with target language comparable speeches to assess the contributions of predefined and data-driven features to the distinction between translation, interpreting and originals. Our analysis reveals that interpreting is more distinct from comparable originals than translation and that its most distinctive features signal an overemphasis of oral, online production more than showing traces of cross-linguistically mediated communication.

No keywords available