Construction of a scheme for describing differences between translations

Abstract

In the translation industry, translation education, and machine translation research, multiple translations with the same original text can and do exist. In such cases, it is necessary to recognize and share the differences between translations. This paper presents the process of developing a scheme for describing differences between target documents (TD) that have the same source document (SD). Our scheme includes a system for describing translation differences and a decision tree. We first constructed a system consisting of concepts and their definitions, which has three categories: Syntactics, Semantics, and Pragmatics. We then created a decision tree as a procedure for applying the system, and defined several rules to enable us to consistently apply our scheme to the translation data. This paper also describes the application of our scheme to 50 types of TDs. The result shows that our scheme is helpful for describing the differences between TDs with high resolution.