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arXiv · 2204.05655

Creativity in translation: machine translation as a constraint for literary texts

Ana Guerberof Arenas·Antonio Toral
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Abstract

This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a short story by Kurt Vonnegut from English to Catalan and Dutch using three modalities: machine-translation (MT), post-editing (PE) and translation without aid (HT). Our aim is to explore creativity, understood to involve novelty and acceptability, from a quantitative perspective. The results show that HT has the highest creativity score, followed by PE, and lastly, MT, and this is unanimous from all reviewers. A neural MT system trained on literary data does not currently have the necessary capabilities for a creative translation; it renders literal solutions to translation problems. More importantly, using MT to post-edit raw output constrains the creativity of translators, resulting in a poorer translation often not fit for publication, according to experts.

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Ana Guerberof Arenas, Antonio Toral. 2022-04-12. Creativity in translation: machine translation as a constraint for literary texts. https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.21025.gue

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