English, German and the “Semi-Professional” International Translator: A Morphological Approach to Implied Connotative Features

Abstract

The present approach targets the facilitation of translation and the correct transfer of opinions, style and overall spirit of written and spoken online journalistic texts. Here, we present the integration of an annotation strategy for written and spoken journalistic texts, detecting elements with explicit and implicit connotative features. The proposed annotation strategy is morphologically based, functioning as a checklist and targeting to address re-occurring problems encountered mainly by "semi-professional" translators, namely journalists, economists and other professionals working with multilingual written and transcribed journalistic texts available from the media and the Internet. Most of these professionals, usually having an above-average fluency of one or more foreign languages, often lack the necessary exposure to the culture(s) related to the concerned foreign language(s), especially due to distance or frequent changes of location. Thus, essential information is presented either in a subtle form or in an indirect way, constituting emotionally and socio-culturally "marked" elements, often going undetected. The present user-oriented design is aimed to be 8 English, German and the "Semi-Professional" International Translator integrated into an annotation tool targeting the indication of the largest possible percentage of the points in the texts signalizing "marked" information, alerting the user-translator to evaluate these expressions and, in the case of transcribed spoken journalistic texts, to allow a comparison of "marked" elements with prosodic and paralinguistic features in the respective multimedia files.

Controlling Interaction in Multilingual Conversation

“…In cases of languages processed in which opinions are frequently indirectly stated with the use of specific phrases or expressions, predefined expressions and phrases expressing opinions or views may be signalized and processed as additional keywords in the template-agenda. These expressions may include language-specific word-types related to connotative features such as adjectives and adverbs, verbs containing semantic features related to descriptive features, mode, malignant/benign action or emotional/ethical gravity, as well as some modal verbs [1]. These elements may be tagged as "non-neutral" opinion markers [4] in written text processed by the Text-to-Text Machine Translation System or in the proposed S-ILTs in the Speech-to-Speech Translation System.…”