Media of Langue: The Interface for Exploring Word Translation Network/Space
This work addresses the challenge of understanding semantic configurations in translation for linguists and language learners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing bilingual data and dictionary concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of exploring word translation relationships across languages by proposing Media of Langue, a novel interface for visualizing Word Translation Networks constructed from bilingual corpora, resulting in a web application that integrates dictionary information for seven language pairs.
In the human activity of word translation, two languages face each other, mutually searching their own language system for the semantic place of words in the other language. We discover the huge network formed by the chain of these mutual translations as Word Translation Network, a network where words are nodes, and translation volume is represented as edges, and propose Media of Langue, a novel interface for exploring this network. Media of Langue points to the semantic configurations of many words in multiple languages at once, containing the information of existing dictionaries such as bilingual and synonym dictionaries. We have also implemented and published this interface as a web application, focusing on seven language pairs. This paper first defines the Word Translation Network and describes how to actually construct the network from bilingual corpora, followed by an analysis of the properties of the network. Next, we explain how to design a Media of Langue using the Word Translation Network, and finally, we analyze the features of the Media of Langue as a dictionary. Our website is https://www.media-of-langue.org .