Towards a Proactive MWE Terminological Platform for Cross-Lingual Mediation in the Age of Big Data

Abstract

The emergence of China as a global economic power in the 21st Century has brought about surging needs for cross-lingual and cross-cultural mediation, typically performed by translators. Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Language Engineering have been bolstered by Machine learning and suitable Big Data cultivation. They have helped to meet some of the translator’s needs, though the technical specialists have not kept pace with the practical and expanding requirements in language mediation. One major technical and linguistic hurdle involves words outside the vocabulary of the translator or the lexical database he/she consults, especially Multi-Word Expressions (Compound Words) in technical subjects. A further problem is in the multiplicity of renditions of a term in the target language. This paper discusses a proactive approach following the successful extraction and application of sizable bilingual Multi-Word Expressions (Compound Words) for language mediation in technical subjects, which do not fall within the expertise of typical translators, who have inadequate appreciation of the range of new technical tools available to help him/her. Our approach draws on the personal reflections of translators and teachers of translation and is based on the prior R&D efforts relating to 300,000 comparable Chinese-English patents. The subsequent protocol we have developed aims to be proactive in meeting four identified practical challenges in technical translation (e.g. patents). It has broader economic implication in the Age of Big Data (Tsou et al, 2015) and Trade War, as the workload, if not, the challenges, increasingly cannot be met by currently available front-line translators. We shall demonstrate how new tools can be harnessed to spearhead the application of language technology not only in language mediation but also in the “teaching” and “learning” of translation. It shows how a better appreciation of their needs may enhance the contributions of the technical specialists, and thus enhance the resultant synergetic benefits.