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Looking for bilingual files in the field of literary translation
Thread poster: Federico Balestra
Federico Balestra
Federico Balestra  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 03:12
English to Italian
+ ...
Jun 25

Hello everybody, I need help for a University project I am working on. I hope this is the right place to ask, I'm still new here.
I am currently working on an MA thesis that involves using Machine Translation to translate puns; since we all know it i doesn't work well when applied to certain kind of texts, I'm trying to understand if there are strategies that translators could adopt to make it helpful. In order to carry out some research, I need to train MT models and I'm looking for bili... See more
Hello everybody, I need help for a University project I am working on. I hope this is the right place to ask, I'm still new here.
I am currently working on an MA thesis that involves using Machine Translation to translate puns; since we all know it i doesn't work well when applied to certain kind of texts, I'm trying to understand if there are strategies that translators could adopt to make it helpful. In order to carry out some research, I need to train MT models and I'm looking for bilingual files containing English literary texts (or parts of those texts) and their translation into Italian. I would also like to know if I can find such bilingual files focusing exclusively on puns and wordplay (for instance, a bilingual file containing a list of English puns and the respective translation into Italian).
Thank you in advance to whover might help me! ▲ Collapse
 
Zea_Mays
Zea_Mays  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 03:12
English to German
+ ...
copyright Jun 25

Beside the discussion around how useful this actually is, literary originals and translations are protected by copyright laws.

Federico Balestra
P.L.F. Persio
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Ester Vidal
neilmac
 
Steven Smith
Steven Smith
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:12
Member (2007)
Japanese to English
Morning thoughts on a punishing task Jun 26

Puns and wordplay are so rooted in the soil of individual languages and in human creativity that I'd be surprised if a machine could be trained to translate them. At any rate, I doubt that you could build a useful bilingual pun corpus for training.

The main options for pun translation are:
1. Translate the surface meaning of the source pun but lose the word-play and humour elements.
2. Translate the humorous intent of the pun by creating a new pun drawing on other punna... See more
Puns and wordplay are so rooted in the soil of individual languages and in human creativity that I'd be surprised if a machine could be trained to translate them. At any rate, I doubt that you could build a useful bilingual pun corpus for training.

The main options for pun translation are:
1. Translate the surface meaning of the source pun but lose the word-play and humour elements.
2. Translate the humorous intent of the pun by creating a new pun drawing on other punnable words in the vicinity.

I can't see a bilingual corpus being easy to create or useful for either. Really, to translate or transcreate puns/wordplay, it would be useful to train your machine to:
1. Recognize the pun,
2. Mine the surrounding target context for punnable words
3. Based on step 2, create or find a pun/wordplay that recreates the humour or cleverness of the original.

Of course, if you want a real translation challenge, palindromic redividers are the way to go...

Pull a web, or…need its even word spool?
Pull awe-borne edit, seven words pool:
Loops drown, Eve’s tide enrobe, wall up. ▲ Collapse


Federico Balestra
P.L.F. Persio
philgoddard
neilmac
 
philgoddard
philgoddard
United States
German to English
+ ...
Maybe I'm wrong, but... Jun 27

I don't think AI will be able to translate puns or novels in my lifetime. And the only way to obtain a bilingual file of puns is to create it yourself.

Human translations of Finnegans Wake might be helpful. There are puns on every page.

P.L.F. Persio
Steven Smith
neilmac
 


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Looking for bilingual files in the field of literary translation







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