Concept similarity and conceptual information alteration via English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation of medical article titles
✍ Scribed by He, Shaoyi
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 62 KB
- Volume
- 49
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-8231
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Some larity and conceptual information alteration in medical
researchers have studied translation as information transtranslation as information transfer between English and fer via English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English trans-Chinese. The purpose of this investigation was twofold: lation of journal article titles (Loh & Kong, 1977;Wang One was to explore conceptual information alteration et al., 1991; Zhang, 1994). There are no researchers, through concept similarity in the translation of medical article titles between English and Chinese, and the other however, who have examined concept similarity and conwas to examine the reliability of inter-judge agreements ceptual information alteration in translation as informaon concept similarity for assessing conceptual information transfer between English and Chinese, and vice versa. tion alteration via English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-A concept, as defined by Larson (1984, p. 55), is a recog-English translation of medical article titles. A research nizable unit of meaning in any given language. So, in a corpus of 100 article titles in English and Chinese were randomly selected from an existing collection of article given language, the concept may not only be represented titles obtained from two English medical journals and by a word, but also be represented by a morpheme, by two Chinese medical journals. Findings were based on an idiomatic expression, by tone, or by word order (Barn-(1) the judges' pairing of concepts in both the original well, 1980, p. 141). In translation, a concept represented and translated titles, and (2) the judges' judgments on by a word in one language may be translated into a word, concept similarity of the paired concepts. Cohen's Kappa was used for determining the reliability of the or two words, or a phrase, or even a sentence in another judges' judgments. The results showed (1) the judges'
language. Such is called concept equivalence, which is a ratings on concept similarity of the paired concepts were common phenomenon in translation between languages.
substantially reliable; (2) the loss of conceptual informa-
For instance, the concept of ''a medical specialist who tion was much greater than the gain in both Englishpractices surgery'' is represented by an English word to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation; and (3) there were two kinds of conceptual information alter-''surgeon,'' but, it is represented by two Chinese words ation: One was apparent and the other latent. The results waike yisheng in which waike is ''surgical department'' are also applicable to cross-language information reand yisheng is ''doctor.'' Besides concept equivalence, trieval on parallel corpora between different languages concept similarity and concept dissimilarity are also comas well as between English and Chinese.
mon phenomena in the translation between English and Chinese. For example, the English word ''patient'' that means ''person under medical treatment'' is conceptually