Abstract and introduction

Abstract

Is structural difference in a language pair associated with difficulty in translating or interpreting complex sentences in that pair? This study aims to shed light on that question. Specifically, it seeks associations between typological differences in the branching direction of subordinate clauses and three identified indicators of difficulty in translation or interpretation. The unit of analysis used to measure rates for those indicators is the semantic proposition. The analysis involves translation or interpretation from English into five languages from different families: Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, Mandarin and Japanese. Three modes of language transfer are considered: legal translation, subtitle translation and simultaneous interpretation. The findings provide initial confirmation that greater structural difference in a language pair is associated with higher rates for indicators of difficulty in translation or interpretation in that pair, with some major differences between the three modes considered.

1. Introduction

Many factors can contribute to the difficulty of a translation or interpretation task. Some of those factors can have to do with the text or speech – like subject, terms, idioms, register, style or (for interpretation) speed. Others can have to do with the translator or interpreter – like experience, background knowledge, personal beliefs, or physical or emotional state. The task can be made more difficult by cultural differences – like history, politics, popular references or norms of politeness. The same is true of linguistic features – like writing systems, morphology, irregularity, grammatical ambiguity or homophony.

But there’s another major factor of difficulty which can often be underestimated: structural difference in the language pair of translation or interpretation – especially large-scale typological difference in the branching direction of subordinate clauses. This study seeks associations between that typological difference and three identified indicators of difficulty in translation and interpretation. It first counts the average rate for each indicator in a corpus of more than 1000 English sentences, each translated or interpreted into five languages from different families: Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, Mandarin and Japanese. It then seeks associations between those rates and the structural difference of each language pair.

Each indicator of difficulty involves relations between propositions. A proposition is the semantic relation underlying a syntactic clause. The proposition is a good unit for cross-linguistic comparison, because an event or situation can be described in different syntactic forms in different languages. This study uses the proposition as a unit of analysis to measure rates for three features of translation or interpretation identified as indicators of difficulty: reordering, changes in nested structures and changes in semantic relations.

The study doesn’t claim to measure the level of difficulty in a given translation or interpretation task. But it does assume that, if reordering, nesting changes and changes in semantic relations are accepted as indicators of some degree of production difficulty, then a higher count for any one of those indicators suggests a greater degree of difficulty than a lower count for the same indicator.

The sentences examined are from texts and speeches with global impact representing three modes of language transfer: legal translation, subtitle translation and simultaneous interpretation. For legal translation, I analyze translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. For subtitle translation, I analyze translated subtitles for the five most popular TED talks. For simultaneous interpretation, I analyze recorded interpretation of President Obama’s 2015 speech to the UN General Assembly.

The statistical analysis reveals strong associations between three independent variables – structural difference, mode of transfer and sentence complexity – and three dependent variables – the indicators of difficulty mentioned above.

Taken together, the findings of the study suggest that, the more a language pair differs in structure, the more difficult it may be to translate or interpret a complex sentence in that pair, and the more the meaning may be changed – with some major differences between the three modes of transfer considered.