Han Tianyi, Li Dechao, Ma Xingcheng, Hu Nan
Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China.
School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Nov 25;13:1048132. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1048132. eCollection 2022.
Translation and paraphrasing, as typical forms in second language (L2) communication, have been considered effective learning methods in second language acquisition (SLA). While many studies have investigated their similarities and differences in a process-oriented approach, little attention has been paid to the correlation in product quality between them, probably due to difficulties in assessing the quality of translation and paraphrasing. Current quality evaluation methods tend to be either subjective and one-sided or lack consistency and standardization. To address these limitations, we proposed preliminary evaluation frameworks for translation and paraphrasing by incorporating indices from natural language processing (NLP) tools into teachers' rating rubrics and further compared the product quality of the two activities. Twenty-nine translators were recruited to perform a translation task (translating from Chinese to English) and a paraphrasing task (paraphrasing in English). Their output products were recorded by key-logging technique and graded by three professional translation teachers by using a 10-point Likert Scale. This rating process adopted rubrics consisting of both holistic and analytical assessments. Besides, indices containing textual features from lexical and syntactic levels were extracted from TAASSC and TAALES. We identified indices that effectively predicted product quality using Pearson's correlation analysis and combined them with expert evaluation rubrics to establish NLP-assisted evaluation frameworks for translation and paraphrasing. With the help of these frameworks, we found a closely related performance between the two tasks, evidenced by several shared predictive indices in lexical sophistication and strong positive correlations between translated and paraphrased text quality according to all the rating metrics. These similarities suggest a shared language competence and mental strategies in different types of translation activities and perhaps in other forms of language tasks. Meanwhile, we also observed differences in the most salient textual features between translations and paraphrases, mainly due to the different processing costs required by the two tasks. These findings enrich our understanding of the shared ground and divergences in product quality between translation and paraphrasing and shed light on the pedagogical application of translation activities in classroom teaching. Moreover, the proposed evaluation framework can also bring insights into the development of standardized evaluation frameworks in translation and paraphrasing in the future.
翻译与释义作为第二语言（L2）交流中的典型形式，在第二语言习得（SLA）中被视为有效的学习方法。尽管许多研究从过程导向的角度调查了它们的异同，但很少有人关注它们在产品质量方面的相关性，这可能是由于评估翻译和释义质量存在困难。当前的质量评估方法往往主观片面，或者缺乏一致性和标准化。为了解决这些局限性，我们通过将自然语言处理（NLP）工具的指标纳入教师评分标准，提出了翻译和释义的初步评估框架，并进一步比较了这两种活动的产品质量。招募了29名翻译人员执行一项翻译任务（从中文翻译成英文）和一项释义任务（用英文释义）。他们的输出产品通过按键记录技术进行记录，并由三位专业翻译教师使用10点李克特量表进行评分。这个评分过程采用了包含整体评估和分析评估的标准。此外，从TAASSC和TAALES中提取了包含词汇和句法层面文本特征的指标。我们使用皮尔逊相关分析确定了有效预测产品质量的指标，并将它们与专家评估标准相结合，建立了翻译和释义的NLP辅助评估框架。借助这些框架，我们发现这两项任务之间存在密切相关的表现，这在词汇复杂性方面的几个共享预测指标以及根据所有评分指标翻译文本质量和释义文本质量之间的强正相关中得到了证明。这些相似之处表明在不同类型的翻译活动以及可能在其他形式的语言任务中存在共同的语言能力和心理策略。同时，我们也观察到翻译和释义在最突出的文本特征上存在差异，主要是由于这两项任务所需的处理成本不同。这些发现丰富了我们对翻译和释义在产品质量方面的共同点和差异的理解，并为翻译活动在课堂教学中的教学应用提供了启示。此外，提出的评估框架也可以为未来翻译和释义标准化评估框架的发展提供见解。
