Corpus Linguistics, Translation and Error Analysis
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Corpus Linguistics, Translation and Error Analysis Maria Stambolieva Centre for Computational and Applied Linguistics & Laboratory for Language Technology New Bulgarian University Abstract The software environment is the NBU E-Platform for teaching and research. The paper presents a study of the French Imparfait and its functional equivalents in The corpora used are the electronic versions of Bulgarian and English in view of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince1 and its applications in (machine) translation, translations in Bulgarian2 and English3. foreign language teaching and error analysis. The aims of the study are: 1/ The following procedure was used: based on the analysis of a corpus of text, to validate/revise earlier research on the 1/ The source text was annotated (POS-tagged and values of the French Imparfait, 2/ to tagged for Imparfait-marked forms) in the define the contextual factors pointing to grammatical analysis module of the E-Platform. the realisation of one or another value of the forms, 3/ based on the analysis of 2/ The source text was aligned with the texts in the aligned translations, to identify the target languages. translation equivalents of these values, 4/ 3/ With the respective E-Platform module, two to formulate translation rules, 5/ based on the analysis of the translation rules, to virtual corpora were derived – files with lists of refine the annotation modules of the sentences containing a specific annotation value. In environment used – the NBU E-Platform this case the corpora contain lists of sentences with for language teaching and research. Imparfait-marked verbal forms and their translation equivalents in the two target languages. 1 Context For the analysis of the French sentences in the The paper presents work in progress, partly based virtual corpus, the theoretical model proposed by J.- on an earlier investigation by the same author P. Desclés (Desclés 1985, 1990) was adopted – a (Stambolieva 2004), aiming 1/ to define the Tense- system organising four main elements: 1/ a system and-Aspect values of French sentences/clauses of grammatical forms, 2/ a system of values, 3/ a containing a verb marked for the Imparfait; 2/ to system of correspondences between 1/ and 2/, 4/ a describe the linguistic markers linked to each value; system of strategies for context analysis. Important 3/ to link these markers to translation equivalents in studies of the French Imparfait and its equivalents the two target languages: Bulgarian and English. in Bulgarian have been published by Zlatka Guentcheva-Desclés (Guentcheva 1990, 1 3 https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/st_exupery_le_petit_ http://verse.aasemoon.com/images/f/f5/The_Little_Prince.p prince.html df 2 http://old.ppslaveikov.com/Roditeli/knigi%20Lqto/anton.sen t.ekzuperi-makiat.princ.pdf 98 Temnikova, I, Orasan,˘ C., Corpas Pastor, G., and Mitkov, R. (eds.) (2019) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology (HiT-IT 2019), Varna, Bulgaria, September 5 - 6, pages 98–104. https://doi.org/10.26615/issn.2683-0078.2019_012 Guentcheva 1997). A study of the French Imparfait 2 The NBU E-Platform for Language by M. Maire-Reppert (Maire-Reppert 1991) was Teaching and Research found to be very useful for some of the values of the forms set out, the rich corpus of examples an the The NBU E-Platform, a recent project of the NBU 5 excellent attempt at formalization of the contextual Laboratory for Language Technology , was initially markers of the values of the Imparfait. Danchev and developed as a tool for language teaching/learning: Alexieva 1974 and Stambolieva 1987, 1998 and a generator of online training exercises from 2008 are contrastive corpus-based studies of annotated corpora, with exports to Moodle or other contextual markers of tense and aspect in English educational platforms. It has since been extended and their Bulgarian functional equivalents. 4 A with modules and functionalities allowing research pioneering work on the compositionality of aspect in translation and error analysis and supporting in English is Verkuyl 1993. lexicographic projects. The rules linking values to forms and context The E-Platform integrates: 1/ an environment for contain the following information: creating, organising and maintaining electronic text archives and extracting text corpora; 2/ modules for 1/ text element under investigation (indicator) – in linguistic analysis: a lemmatiser, a POS analyser; a our investigation, French verbal lexemes to which term analyser; a morphological analyser, a syntactic the morpheme of the Imparfait is attached; analyser; an analyser of multiple word units (MWU – including complex terms, analytical forms, 2/ scope of the context where the contextual phraseological units); a parallel text aligner; a markers (indices) are found; concordancer; 3/ a linguistic database allowing 3/ contextual markers (indices) – elements of the corpus manipulation without loss of information; 4/ immediate context which resolve the ambiguity of modules for the generation and editing of online the indicator; training exercises. The environment for the maintenance of the electronic text archive organises 4/ values attributed to the combined indicator and a variety of metadata which can, individually or in indices; combinations, form the basis for the extraction of 5/ pairing of the values to functional equivalents in text corpora. Following linguistic analysis, the target languages. secondary (“virtual”) corpora can be extracted – lists of sentences containing a particular unit – a Thus, on a monolingual plane, we derive value lemma (e.g. it, dislike), a word form (e.g. begins), a indices of the indicators – the French verbal forms MWU (e.g. has been writing, put off), a tag (e.g. marked for the Imparfait. On a bilingual plane, <intransitive verb>, <comparative degree>, indicators and indices are linked to translation <present perfect progressive tense>, <imparfait>), equivalents in the target languages of the or a combination of tags. The architecture allows the investigation. parallel use of several systems of preprocessing and The software environment of the project is that the comparison of their results for the purpose of of the NBU e-Platform for language teaching and making an intelligent choice – which can turn it into 6 research (PLT&R) an environment for experimentation and research. 4 Functional equivalence finding is the process, where the in the way, in which the equivalent conveys the same translator understands the concept in the source language and meaning and intent as the original. (Wikipedia) finds a way to express the same concept in the target language 5 NBU CFSR-funded project: https://projects.nbu.bg/projects_inner.asp?pid=642 6 Cf Stambolieva, Ivanova. Raykova 2018 99 Table 1. Architecture of the E-Platform7 The following modules of the platform were Table 3. Aligning with the E-Platform extended for the purpose of the project: 3 Values of the Imparfait and Its Translation - The Text & Corpus organizer Equivalents in Bulgarian and English - The annotation modules: Lemmatiser, The dominant translation equivalents of the POS-tagger, Morphological and Syntactic Imparfait in our corpus are The Simple Past Tense tagger (for English) and The Past Imperfect of - The Aligner Imperfective Aspect verbs (for Bulgarian). - The Virtual Corpus generator. Rule 1: Given an instance X marked by the morpheme of the Imparfait, and if X is a member of the set of verbs of a stative archetype, then the value of the Imparfait is that of “descriptive state” Table 2. The Virtual Corpus generator The Bulgarian translation contains a form of an Imperfective Aspect verb marked for The A new module combining annotation and Past Imperfect alignment was developed as an extension of the Virtual Corpus generator – a generator of virtual The English translation contains a stative corpora coupled with aligned translation verb marked for The Simple Past Tense. equivalents. However, other tense-aspect equivalents also appear: The Past Continuous Tense (for English) and The Present Tense, The Past Indefinite Tense and The Past Perfect Tense of Perfective Aspect verbs, The Future in the Past Tense (for Bulgarian) 7 The E-Platform was initially developed by the Central our colleagues from the Informatics department of New Institute for Informatics and Computer Engineering of the. For Bulgarian University Dr. Mariyana Raykova.and Dr. its architecture, regular support and update we are indebted to Valentina Ivanova. 100 – hence the necessity to identify the different values I took him in my arms and set out walking once of the Imparfait and their contextual markers. more. Maire-Reppert (Maire-Reppert, op. cit.) proposes a very fine-grained set of values of the French The following main triggers of asymmetry in the Imparfait for situation types and for registers, translation equivalents were identified: including seven subtypes of states,8 three subtypes of processes, events, iterative situations, conditions 1/ The Sequence of Tenses is part of the and formulae of politeness. Based on her findings grammatical systems of French and English, but not and an analysis of our corpus, we have arrived at a of Bulgarian: set of rules (94 in all), the general form of which is Ex. 3 J’avais ainsi appris une seconde chose très presented with the following simple rule for importante: c’est que sa planète d’origine était à Descriptive States: peine plus grande qu’une maison ! – Така узнах Ex. 1 Il représentait un serpent boa qui digérait второ, много важно нещо: че неговата родна un éléphant. – Тя изобразяваше змия боа, която планета е малко по-голяма от къща! – I had thus смила слон. – It was a picture of a boa constrictor learned a second fact of great importance: this was digesting an elephant. that the planet the little prince came from was scarcely any larger than a house! Rule 1 indicates the necessity to extend the annotation module with subcategories/subtypes of Rule 2 relies on syntactic annotation – it involves verbal lexemes.