English is a Scandinavian language

The Sandberg team — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 22:52:01 +0000

Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo, and Joseph Emmonds, a visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, received publicity in November 2012 for their paper proposing that the West Germanic Old English may not be the root of modern English after all, but that English being close in structure to modern Norwegian (nynorsk) suggests the language may be based on the Old Norse of the Vikings. The Norse influence on English has of course always been acknowledged, particularly in vocabulary and place names. The way people speak in East Yorkshire in England has a striking resemblance to Danish west-coast dialect, whereas some of the northern-most Scottish islands have a lot in common with Norwegian. Scottish people and Geordies talk about “bairns” rather than “children”, for example.

The Faarlund-Emmonds theory, however, looks beyond the similarities in vocabulary. Such similarities are, after all, common in any two languages that come into contact with each other. They claim that it is the syntax and structure that prove their point. As examples, they provide English structures like the stranded preposition at the end of a sentence which are shared with the Scandinavian languages but which do not occur in German or Dutch.

Whether English is a West Germanic language with Scandinavian influences or a Scandinavian language with West Germanic influences may be of consequence only to the scholars. But if this discussion got the public in the UK interested in the Nordic languages and encouraged a few more students to study them at university, then it cannot be a bad thing. Looking at the limited number of English translators graduating with a Scandinavian language degree these days, I am all for promoting Swedish as the first foreign language for British children to learn. Yes, why not give them something familiar to start with; a very closely related language. It might help bury that age-old adage about the British not being able to pick up foreign languages.

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From the engine room

The Sandberg team — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 22:28:32 +0000

Post-editing of machine translation output (MT-PE) is the process of revising machine-translated content and editing it in such a way that the final product meets the requirements of the client. In most cases, the requirement is to achieve the same quality level as with fully human translation. The industry is working on solutions for analysing the quality of raw MT output and establishing the editing effort needed (preferably before the post-editing actually takes place), since these obviously affect the pricing of the service and the turnaround time that can be expected.

While looking for savings, it is important to realise that the raw output quality of MT engines varies wildly from Google Translate to highly-tuned and customised domain-specific engines. The latter can give very good results. Unless you have worked on the particular MT engine output before, it is difficult to estimate exactly what an equitable level of compensation for the post-editing should be.

The MT output is also usually combined with traditional TM output. Typically, any matches above 70–75% come from the translation memory and are dealt with by the linguist as in any normal job. Any segment below a 70–75% match gets machine-translated and the linguist post-edits it, recognising that there is a difference between editing a segment you know was produced by a human in the past (a TM match) and a segment that was put together by an engine. Typical errors in MT output include incorrect sentence structures, tenses, articles, inconsistent terminology and incorrect or missing tags. A good rule of thumb for the linguist is to look at an MT segment for two seconds and if they do not think they can easily edit it to produce a good result, to discard it and translate it from scratch, or use a lower fuzzy match from the TM instead.

The speed at which a linguist can carry out post-editing is directly linked to the quality of the raw MT output. With the projects STP has done so far, involving Scandinavian languages and customised MT engines, an experienced linguist would generally be expected to process 20–50% more work than when working from scratch. This productivity enhancement gives an indication of the savings in time and costs that can be expected.

Learn more about machine translation here.

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Icebreaker February 2013 Archives - sa���ʴ�ý

English is a Scandinavian language

From the engine room

Icebreaker February 2013 Archives - sa��ʴ�ý