What got lost in online machine translations? Effects on Aspect and Passivization from a literary corpus - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article dans une revue Hispanic Studies Review Année : 2020

What got lost in online machine translations? Effects on Aspect and Passivization from a literary corpus

Résumé

Aspect is a crucial ingredient of temporality, which reflects the speaker's internal perspective on a given situation (Ayoun 2013). This article compares human translations and online machine translations (MT) with the purpose of describing how the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect is realized in Spanish when translating from English. Our results come from 1.6 million-word Social Sciences corpus from which 82 perfective get-passive constructions (e.g., I got saved) were elicited. Although the general pattern is for atelic predicates (states and activities) to occur with the imperfect tense and for telic predicates (accomplishments and achievements) to occur with the preterite, in Spanish all the aspectual predicates can be expressed with preterite and imperfect, depending on what the speaker wants to convey (Montrul & Slabakova 2003: 357). The results show that Spanish imperfect readings were largely preserved in human translations compared to online machine translations. This study discusses the machines' overextension of the preterite as a systemic regularity that bring MT's outputs close to L2 learners' grammars.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
26.06.20_Repiso_HSR_HAL.pdf ( 533.29 Ko ) Télécharger
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...

Dates et versions

halshs-03330903, version 1 (06-09-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-03330903 , version 1

Citer

Isabel Repiso. What got lost in online machine translations? Effects on Aspect and Passivization from a literary corpus. Hispanic Studies Review, 2020, 5 (1), pp.47-66. ⟨halshs-03330903⟩
18 Consultations
61 Téléchargements
Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
comment ces indicateurs sont-ils produits

Partager

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Plus