 Our Work
Please use the links provided below to navigate the CASL directory database.
CASL People | CASL Projects | Publications
Project Details:
Principal Investigators on this project:
Michael, Erica B.
Describing and Improving Translation Processes
Improving Communication in the Intelligence Community
Project Objective: To enhance the performance of foreign language professionals in the creation of English summary translations of foreign language material, both voice and graphic.
Project Definition: Summary translation is defined as the identification, distillation, and presentation of essential information contained in the original material, generally in response to an information request. Summary translation is sometimes called gisting.
Project Importance:
- Summary translation is of critical importance in enabling foreign language analysts to communicate crucial information quickly and efficiently.
- Foreign language analysts cannot provide full translations of the huge volumes of foreign language material that must be processed. Furthermore, other analysts who use the output from foreign language analysts would not have time to read and analyze full translations of all potentially relevant material.
Project Background:
- For effective summary translation, a language analyst must possess a wide range of key knowledge, skills, and abilities, including:
- General language proficiency and translation expertise
- Specific knowledge of language use in specialized contexts
- Ability to scan foreign language materials for relevant information
- Use of analytic skills to infer meaning
- Capability to write concise summaries in English
Project Products:
- Analysis of the Metapragmatic Issues Involved in Summary Translation of Chinese and Korean
- Recommendations for creating a Supervisor's Quality Control Manual
- Recommendations for creating Summary Translation Evaluation Rubrics
Project Reports:
- Summary Translation Research: Preliminary Experimental Results from Chinese and Korean Voice and Graphic Materials
- Summary Translation Research: Annotated Test Bed including Description of Corpus Annotation Methodology
Project Activities:
- We tested whether participants produce better summaries of audio or graphic source material after performing verbatim translations first. Participants had varying levels of proficiency in Chinese or Korean.
Preliminary Findings:
- Verbatim translation and summary translation are separate, measurable skills.
- Strong foreign language skills may not result in strong translation skills.
- Conversational cues can cause misunderstanding that could be more serious than grammar or vocabulary errors in translating voice or graphic material.
- Accurately translating colloquial conversations into written text requires specific training. For the beginning language analysts in this phase of experiments, performing a verbatim translation did not improve the quality of a summary translation created in response to an information request.
|
