Characterizing the Effects of Translation on Intertextuality using Multilingual Embedding Spaces
This addresses the challenge of translating literary devices for translators and scholars, but it is incremental as it builds on existing scholarship about human translation tendencies.
The study tackled the problem of preserving intertextuality, a rhetorical device, in translations by using multilingual embedding spaces to analyze Biblical texts, finding that human translations often amplify intertextuality while machine translations provide a neutral baseline.
Rhetorical devices are difficult to translate, but they are crucial to the translation of literary documents. We investigate the use of multilingual embedding spaces to characterize the preservation of intertextuality, one common rhetorical device, across human and machine translation. To do so, we use Biblical texts, which are both full of intertextual references and are highly translated works. We provide a metric to characterize intertextuality at the corpus level and provide a quantitative analysis of the preservation of this rhetorical device across extant human translations and machine-generated counterparts. We go on to provide qualitative analysis of cases wherein human translations over- or underemphasize the intertextuality present in the text, whereas machine translations provide a neutral baseline. This provides support for established scholarship proposing that human translators have a propensity to amplify certain literary characteristics of the original manuscripts.