Keywords
literary translation assessment
Olga Tokarczuk
Maryla Laurent
How to Cite
Abstract
The dynamic development of automatic translators raises questions about the future of human translators. The aim of this article is to evaluate the French versions of an excerpt from The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, made by Systran, Google Translate and DeepL, and to compare them with the reference translation made by a human translator. The translations were carried out in 2019 as part of the ATLAS association project ‘L’Observatoire de la traduction automatique’. The analyses show that the inability to interpret the original in a complex way leads to weaknesses in machine translators. This proves that the position of the human translator remains unthreatened in the field of translating high-quality literary texts.
References
Baillot, A., Carter, E., Grass, T. & Fabo, P.R. (2022). Vers une robotique du traduire – Introduction. Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities. DOI: https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.10445
Besacier, L. (2014). Traduction automatisée d’une oeuvre littéraire: une étude pilote. Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN). Marseille. https://inria.hal.science/hal-01003944/document.
Bralewski, D. (2012). Od przekładu do słownika. Korpus równoległy w redakcji słowników tłumaczeniowych. Łask : Oficyna Wydawnicza LEKSEM.
Cronin, M. (2016). Przekład w epoce cyfrowej. Kraków : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.
Defert, D. (2022). Dan Brown, Patricia Cornwell et John Grisham à l’épreuve de DeepL. Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities. DOI: https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.9084
Denkowski, M. & Lavie, A. (2010). Choosing the Right Evaluation for Machine Translation : an Examination of Annotator and Automatic Metric Performance on Human Judgment Tasks. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas : Research Papers, Denver. https://aclanthology.org/2010.amta-papers.20/.
Dictionnaire CNRTL en ligne. https://www.cnrtl.fr.
Froeliger, N. (2022). Le mépris (envers la traduction automatique) est-il une attitude traductologique ? https://hal.science/hal-03507329/document.
Grass, T. (2022), L’erreur n’est pas humaine. Traduire, 246, 10-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/traduire.2763
Hansen, D. (2021). Les lettres et la machine : un état de l’art en traduction littéraire automatique. In P. Denis et al. (éds.), Actes de la 28e Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles, vol. 2 : 23e REncontres jeunes Chercheurs en Informatique pour le TAL (RECITAL). Lille (pp. 28-45). https://aclanthology.org/2021.jeptalnrecital-recital.3/.
Koehn, P. (2010). Statistical Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815829
Loffler-Laurian, A.-M. (1996). La traduction automatique. Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.septentrion.74824
Loock, R. (2019). La plus-value de la biotraduction face à la machine. Traduire, 241, 54-65. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/traduire.1848
Maingueneau, D. (2000). Éléments de linguistique pour le texte littéraire. Paris : Nathan.
Marzi, E. (2021). La traduction automatique neuronale et les biais de genre : le cas des noms de métiers entre l’italien et le français. Synergies Italy, 17, 19-36. https://gerflint.fr/Base/Italie17/marzi.pdf.
Melby, A.K., Warner, T. (1995). The Possibility of Language. A discussion of the nature of language, with implications for human and machine translation. Amsterdam-Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.14
Popović, M. (2018). Error Classification and Analysis for Machine Translation Quality Assessment. In J. Moorkens, S. Castilho, F. Gaspari & S. Doherty (éds.), Translation Quality Assessment. Machine Translation : Technologies and Applications, vol. 1 (pp. 129-158). Cham : Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91241-7_7
Śmigielska, B. (2011). Rôle et description du contexte dans la traduction automatique des textes – approche orientée objets. Romanica Cracoviensia, 11 (1), 422-432.
Tokarczuk, O. (2017). Księgi Jakubowe. Kraków : Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Toral, A. & Way, A. (2018). What Level of Quality can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text ? In J. Moorkens, S. Castilho, F. Gaspari & S. Doherty (éds.), Translation Quality Assessment : From Principles to Practice (pp. 263-287). Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91241-7_12
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Magdalena Mitura
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
- The Author hereby warrants that he/she is the owner of all the copyright and other intellectual property rights in the Work and that, within the scope of the present Agreement, the paper does not infringe the legal rights of another person.The owner of the copyright work also warrants that he/she is the sole and original creator thereof and that is not bound by any legal constraints in regard to the use or sale of the work.
- The Author grants the Purchaser non-exclusive and free of charge license to unlimited use worldwide over an unspecified period of time in the following areas of exploitation:
2.1. production of multiple copies of the Work produced according to the specific application of a given technology, including printing, reproduction of graphics through mechanical or electrical means (reprography) and digital technology;
2.2. marketing authorisation, loan or lease of the original or copies thereof;
2.3. public performance, public performance in the broadcast, video screening, media enhancements as well as broadcasting and rebroadcasting, made available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the Work from a place and at a time individually chosen by them;
2.4. inclusion of the Work into a collective work (i.e. with a number of contributions);
2.5. inclusion of the Work in the electronic version to be offered on an electronic platform, or any other conceivable introduction of the Work in its electronic version to the Internet;
2.6. dissemination of electronic versions of the Work in its electronic version online, in a collective work or independently;
2.7. making the Work in the electronic version available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the Work from a place and at a time individually chosen by them, in particular by making it accessible via the Internet, Intranet, Extranet;
2.8. making the Work available according to appropriate license pattern Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) as well as another language version of this license or any later version published by Creative Commons. - The Author grants the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan permission to:
3.1. reproduce a single copy (print or download) and royalty-free use and disposal of rights to compilations of the Work and these compilations.
3.2. send metadata files related to the Work, including to commercial and non-commercial journal-indexing databases. - The Author declares that, on the basis of the license granted in the present Agreement, the Purchaser is entitled and obliged to allow third parties to obtain further licenses (sublicenses) to the Work and to other materials, including derivatives thereof or compilations made based on or including the Work, whereas the provisions of such sub-licenses will be the same as with the attributed license pattern Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)or another language version of this license, or any later version of this license published by Creative Commons. Thereby, the Author entitles all interested parties to use the work, for non-commercial purposes only, under the following conditions:
4.1. acknowledgment of authorship, i.e. observing the obligation to provide, along with the distributed work, information about the author, title, source (link to the original Work, DOI) and of the license itself.
4.2. the derivatives of the Work are subject to the same conditions, i.e. they may be published only based on a licence which would be identical to the one granting access to the original Work. - The University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań is obliged to
5.1. make the Work available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the Work from a place and at a time individually chosen by them, without any technological constraints;
5.2. appropriately inform members of the public to whom the Work is to be made available about sublicenses in such a way as to ensure that all parties are properly informed (appropriate informing messages).
Other provisions
- The University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań hereby preserves the copyright to the journal as a whole (layout/stylesheet, graphics, cover design, logo etc.)