The neural machine translation of dislocations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0035/000577Keywords:
dislocation, French-English language pairs, neural machine translationAbstract
his paper investigates neural machine translation (NMT) outputs for dislocated constructions translated from French into English. Dislocations are often considered “substandard in formal registers” (Lambrecht 1994: 12). In French, multiple copies of the subject are permissible in spoken discourse, whereas equivalent constructions are generally excluded in English translations (De Cat 2007). We analysed 436 translations of French dislocated segments from Voyage au bout de la nuit and spoken-language data from the Corpus de Français Parlé Parisien (CFPP) using DeepL and Google Translate. Beyond prototypical X, c’est dislocations, translation systems continue to produce inaccurate outputs, potentially due to the limited inclusion of spoken-language data in NMT training corpora.
References
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