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A model of comparative stylistics for machine translation

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Machine Translation

Abstract

The study of comparative stylistics attempts to catalogue and explain the differences in style between languages. Rules of comparative stylistics are commonly presented in textbooks of translation as simple ‘rules of thumb’, but if we hope to incorporate a knowledge of comparative stylistics into machine translation systems, we must take a more systematic approach. We develop a formal model of comparative syntactic stylistics to be used as a component of a general computational theory of style. We adapt textbook rules of human translation and study a small corpus of French-English translations to determine how these informal rules can be represented in our model as formal rules of translation. Our model of comparative stylistics could be implemented in a machine translation system, enabling the system to make a more informed decision about possible translation choices and their potential stylistic effects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Chrysanne Dimarco & Keith Mah

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  1. Chrysanne Dimarco
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  2. Keith Mah
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Dimarco, C., Mah, K. A model of comparative stylistics for machine translation. Mach Translat 9, 21–59 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00980198

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