Translation Differences and Pragmatics-Based MT
Machine translation, (1998)Abstract
This paper examines differences between two professional translations into English of the same Spanish newspaper article. Among other explanations for these differences, such as outright errors and free variation, we find a significant number of differences are due to differing beliefs on the part of the translators about the subject matter and about what the author wished to say. Furthermore, these differences are consistent with divergent global views of the translators about the likelihood of future events (earthquakes and tidal waves) and about (rational or irrational) reactions of people to such likelihood. We discuss the requirements for a pragmatics-based model of translation that would account for these differences.
