Invited Talks: Towards a quantitative study of translation mismatches: A linguistic approach applied to French-Chinese 面向翻譯不匹配的定量研究：應用於法譯漢的語言學方法 ( 本次活動以中英文進行 )

The EMI Resource Center and the Bilingual Education and Multicultural Promotion Office at National Chengchi University, with sponsored funding by the National Science and Technology Council, jointly hosted an international talk on March 18th, featuring Dr. Rafaël Poiret, titled "Towards a Quantitative Study of Translation Mismatches: A Linguistic Approach Applied to French-Chinese." The event took place in the Meeting Hall of the beautiful Dah Hsian Seetoo Library on the NCCU campus.

During the lecture, Dr. Poiret delved into the practical aspects of French-Chinese translation from a linguistic perspective, shedding light on linguistic discrepancies between French and Chinese translations, particularly focusing on the quantitative research methodology regarding syntactic misalignment during translation. The term “mismatch” in the translation field refers to discrepancies between translations and their source texts, which sometimes do not adhere to literal correspondences. The speaker mentioned that currently, it is more common for literary texts translated from French to Chinese to go through English as an intermediary language. Moreover, there is relatively little research in the translation field on marking and quantifying the phenomena of mismatch between French and Chinese translations. Additionally, the speaker's goal is to establish a corpus system to examine the phenomenon of translation mismatch through this system. Through Dr. Poiret's quantitative research and discussions on translation asymmetry, it can be seen that manual annotation continues to be of interest in the era of AI translation.

In addition to discussing the mismatch phenomena in French-Chinese translation, Dr. Poiret demonstrated how to model translation mismatches for application in French-Chinese translation corpora. To establish a multi-level functional corpus, researchers performed various operations, including text tokenization, semi-automatic annotation of surface syntax trees, alignment, and annotation of deep syntactic rewrites. These efforts aimed to enhance understanding of translation mismatches and facilitate quantitative analysis using statistical methods.

Dr. Poiret concluded the lecture by summarizing the new findings and future research directions, emphasizing the necessity of formal classification and annotation of translation mismatches. He also highlighted the importance of using multi-level syntactic annotation corpora. Future research will further explore the frequency and characteristics of translation mismatches.

This lecture provided a new perspective on the study of translation mismatches in French-Chinese translation, contributing to both the linguistic and translation fields. The EMI Resource Center had the honor of inviting Professor Laurent Prévot, a researcher from Aix-Marseille Université in France, to be the commentator. Professor Prévot is currently a visiting scholar at the Taiwan Center for French Modern China Studies (CNRS).

During the event, Professor Prévot provided commentary on Dr. Poiret's research, sharing insights into the presentation of such translation linguistic research, data annotation, and construction methods, as well as connecting them to the current developments in computational linguistics. This discussion elevated the lecture topic to an international level, emphasizing its significance in academic development. EMI Resource Center Director, Professor Siaw-Fong Chung concluded that constructing language resources is a challenging process that takes time, but the results are crucial for academic advancement. 

This event not only provided an opportunity for young scholars and seasoned researchers to share their research but also encouraged active participation from professors and students in French and other foreign language teaching at National Chengchi University, making it a valuable academic exchange activity.

We extend our gratitude to Dr. Rafaël Poiret and Dr. Laurent Prévot for their insightful contributions, expanding our understanding of linguistics and translation and guiding future research endeavors. We look forward to witnessing more research outcomes and engaging in further academic exchanges to deepen our knowledge in the fields of linguistics and translation.

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