Papers by Kristine Bundgaard
The professional translator vs. Google Translate: the case of Lars Larsen’s autobiography
Hermes, Jan 17, 2024
Wishing to contribute to a necessary discussion of how the task of translation should be conceptu... more Wishing to contribute to a necessary discussion of how the task of translation should be conceptualised in our posthuman world, the paper investigates what characterises a professional translation completely unaided by translation technology and compares it with a translation generated by Google Translate (GT), a well-known and free neural machine translation (NMT), based on artificial intelligence (AI). The source text is Lars Larsen’s Danish-language autobiography from 2004, assessed as particularly challenging to translate because of many instances of contextually and culturally embedded meaning. Analyses are carried out in three steps: (1) a textual analysis of the source text; (2) a skopos-theoretical analysis of the professional translation; and (3) comparative analyses of the two translations. In terms of wording, two thirds of the translations are assessed as sufficiently similar to conclude that these parts of the GT translation achieve professional translation quality. The remaining parts are sufficiently different to conclude that professional quality is not achieved by GT. The professional translator complies with professional ethics and Vermeer’s hierarchy of rules and succeeds in solving all predefined translation problems, while this is not the case for GT. The reason may be that GT does not understand text in the real sense of the word, does not work situationally and goal-oriented and does not base decisions on professional expertise and ethics. While we are looking into a future with increasingly advanced translation technology, we should not lose sight of what is expected of a professional translation.
Du gør det også, ikke? Bruger Google Translate. Men burde du?
Du gør det også, ikke? Bruger Google Translate. Men burde du?
KOMmagasinet, Apr 26, 2021
Learning tech, Jan 17, 2024
Back translation:A neglected area in Translation Studies
Brobygning til sproguddannelser på universitetet: Fem praksisanbefalinger
Sprogforum. Tidsskrift for sprog- og kulturpædagogik
Hvad har automatisk oversættelse og selvkørende biler tilfælles
KOMmagasinet, Jun 1, 2021
Dansk Universitetspædagogisk Tidsskrift
Baseret på en generel opfattelse af, at overgangen mellem uddannelsestrin er central for fasthold... more Baseret på en generel opfattelse af, at overgangen mellem uddannelsestrin er central for fastholdelse af studerende, er formålet med denne artikel at undersøge de normer og adfærdsmønstre, som sprogstuderende har taget afsked med, såvel som deres oplevelse af overgangen til nye normer og adfærdsmønstre på første semester af deres universitetssprogstudium. Datagrundlaget omfatter undervisningsobservationer og uformelle samtaler på ungdomsuddannelser samt fokusgruppeinterviews med sprogstuderende på universitetet i starten af henholdsvis første og andet semester. Analyserne tydeliggør elementer i overgangen, som de studerende finder udfordrende.Dette gælder f.eks. grammatikundervisningen på universitetet, manglende sparring med medstuderende i studiegrupper, uklar relevans af bestemte fag og undervisernes praksis på den digitale læringsplatform. Resultaterne sammenholdes desuden med tidligere studier af overgange mellem uddannelsestrin.
Call for papers: Cognitive aspects of non-professional translators’ interactions with digital translation tools
HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2017
Today technology is part and parcel of professional translation, and translation has therefore be... more Today technology is part and parcel of professional translation, and translation has therefore been characterised as Translator-Computer Interaction (TCI) (O’Brien 2012). Translation is increasingly carried out using Translation Memory (TM) systems which incorporate machine translation (MT), referred to as MT-assisted TM translation, and in this type of tool, translators switch between editing TM matches and post-editing MT matches. It is generally assumed that translators’ attitudes towards technology impact on this interaction with the technology. Drawing on Eagly/Chaiken’s (1995) definition of attitudes as evaluations of entities with favour or disfavour and on qualitative data from a workplace study of TCI, conducted as part of a PhD dissertation (Bundgaard 2017) and partly reported on in Bundgaard et al. (2016), this paper explores translator attitudes towards TCI in the form of MT-assisted TM translation. In doing so, the paper has a particular focus on the disfavour towards T...
Who is the back translator? An integrative literature review of back translator descriptions in cross-cultural adaptation of research instruments
Perspectives, 2018
ABSTRACT Back translation (BT) has received little attention in Translation Studies, but in the h... more ABSTRACT Back translation (BT) has received little attention in Translation Studies, but in the health sciences, it is considered the gold standard for quality assurance in the process of cross-cultural adaptation of research. Despite the widespread application of BT in the health sciences, limited focus seems to be given to the qualifications of the person actually performing the job, i.e., the back translator. Furthermore, guidelines on the BT methodology use a variety of terms to describe the desired qualifications of the back translator. Against this backdrop, this study set out to investigate how back translators are described in health sciences research studies on the translation of research instruments and how these descriptions match the literature and guidelines on the BT methodology. Based on an integrative literature review of 105 empirical studies within the health sciences, the results show that some studies provide no or extremely limited information on back translators; for instance, some studies do not even provide the number of back translators used. When the language and translation competences of the back translator are, in fact, described, a variety of labels are used, and these are sometimes vague or even conflicting.
Revision of computer-assisted translation in a large Danish translation agency - a field study
Due to the forces of globalisation and the explosion in digital content during the last decades, ... more Due to the forces of globalisation and the explosion in digital content during the last decades, demand for translation has increased significantly. Since traditional human translation is unable to meet this increasing demand, translation tools or so-called computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools are employed in an attempt to increase productivity. Translation Memory (TM) has been the prominent CAT tool for many years. However, in recent years, Machine Translation (MT) has been incorporated in many CAT tools. This combination, also known as MT-assisted TM translation, is the focus of this thesis. When working with an MT-assisted TM tool, a translator receives suggestions for the translation of every sentence in the source text. In the case of TM, suggestions come from translations previously produced by the translator himor herself or other human translators, whereas in the case of MT, suggestions are automatically generated by means of MT software. The purpose of this thesis is t...
Though we lack empirically-based knowledge of the impact of computer-aided translation (CAT) tool... more Though we lack empirically-based knowledge of the impact of computer-aided translation (CAT) tools on translation processes, it is generally agreed that all professional translators are now involved in some kind of translator-computer interaction (TCI), using O’Brien’s (2012) term. Taking a TCI perspective, this paper investigates the relationship between machines and humans in the field of translation, analysing a CAT process in which machine-translation (MT) technology was integrated into a translation-memory (TM) suite. After a review of empirical research into the impact of CAT tools on translation processes, we report on an observational study of TCI processes in one particular instance of MT-assisted TM translation in a major Danish translation service provider (TSP). Results indicate that the CAT tool played a central role in the translation process. In fact, the study demonstrates that the translator’s processes are both restrained and aided by the tool. As to the restrainin...
A fordító és a számítógép interakciója: egy számítógéppel támogatott fordítási munkafolyamat megfigyelése
Back translation: A neglected area in Translation Studies
This paper reports on a workplace study of industrial practices at a large Danish Language Servic... more This paper reports on a workplace study of industrial practices at a large Danish Language Service Provider and is concerned with how seven translators interact with a translation tool when post-editing translation proposals in an environment that combines translation memory (TM) and machine translation (MT). Recently conducted studies indicate that translation resources play a more important role in the translation process than has previously been acknowledged in process research, and those translators who apply computer-aided translation (CAT) tools find the concordance feature particularly useful. This paper investigates which types of translation resources the translators use when translating a technical and a marketing text from English into Danish at their usual workplace, and whether the concordance feature is the translators’ first choice of resource. Moreover, the paper analyses how the translators explain their interaction with the concordance feature retrospectively. Base...
What motor vehicles and translation machines have in common - a first step towards a translation automation taxonomy
Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 2021
In professional translation and in society in general, translation is increasingly automated. How... more In professional translation and in society in general, translation is increasingly automated. However, in Translation Studies, we lack an updated taxonomy of translation automation (TA) to understand the evolving and dynamic relationship between humans and digital technologies. Therefore, taking a first step towards a new taxonomy of TA, this paper adapts the Society of Automotive Engineers’ taxonomy of six levels of driving automation, ranging from no automation to fully automated driverless cars, to the field of translation. The six levels of the TA taxonomy basically describe whether the translator and/or the system translates by means of source-text analysis and target-text production and checks for and corrects errors and inadequacies; whether the translator or the system responds to system failures; and whether the performance of the system is limited to a certain domain. Adapting the taxonomy was a complex endeavor, and constructive criticism from stakeholders interested in TA would be welcome.
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Papers by Kristine Bundgaard