Kunilovskaya, Maria; Przybyl, Heike; Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina; Teich, Elke
Simultaneous Interpreting as a Noisy Channel: How Much Information Gets Through
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria, pp. 608–618, Varna, Bulgaria, 2023.
We explore the relationship between information density/surprisal of source and target texts in translation and interpreting in the language pair English-German, looking at the specific properties of translation (“translationese”). Our data comes from two bidirectional English-German subcorpora representing written and spoken mediation modes collected from European Parliament proceedings. Within each language, we (a) compare original speeches to their translated or interpreted counterparts, and (b) explore the association between segment-aligned sources and targets in each translation direction. As additional variables, we consider source delivery mode (read-out, impromptu) and source speech rate in interpreting. We use language modelling to measure the information rendered by words in a segment and to characterise the cross-lingual transfer of information under various conditions. Our approach is based on statistical analyses of surprisal values, extracted from ngram models of our dataset. The analysis reveals that while there is a considerable positive correlation between the average surprisal of source and target segments in both modes, information output in interpreting is lower than in translation, given the same amount of input. Significantly lower information density in spoken mediated production compared to nonmediated speech in the same language can indicate a possible simplification effect in interpreting.