Simultaneous translation: Idiom interpretation and parsing heuristics

A model of interpretation, parsing, and error recovery in simultaneous translation was presented and it was argued that the subject first comprehends the text in English and attempts to chunk it into a meaningful unit before accessing the German to translate it.

Abstract

This paper presents a model of interpretation, parsing, and error recovery in simultaneous translation. Two experts and two amateur German—English bilingual translators orally translated written English texts into German while their eye fixations and oral translations were recorded. The text contained phrases such as hit the nail right on the head that have different syntactic parsings and translations depending on whether they are interpreted literally or idiomatically. The eye fixation patterns on these phrases differed for the two interpretations and depended on the preceding context. It was argued that the subject first comprehends the text in English and attempts to chunk it into a meaningful unit before accessing the German to translate it. The unit depends upon both syntactic and semantic cues. The study also investigated how mistranslations are detected and corrected.