Using Bilingual Patents for Translation Training (2020)

Abstract: While bilingual corpora have been instrumental for machine translation, their utility for training translators has been less explored. We investigate the use of bilingual corpora as pedagogical tools for translation in the technical domain. In a user study, novice translators revised Chinese translations of English patents through bilingual concordancing. Results show that concordancing with an in-domain bilingual corpus can yield greater improvement in translation quality of technical terms than a general-domain bilingual corpus.

## introduction text corpora are increasingly used in language pedagogy, with many studies showing their effectiveness in data-driven language learning @xcite , language exercise generation @xcite and assisted writing @xcite , among many other tasks. bilingual corpora, however, remain underused in translation pedagogy. most research has focused on exploiting bilingual data for training machine translation (mt) systems and for developing translation memory (tm) in computer-assisted translation tools. professional translators generally favor dictionaries and search engines over corpora @xcite . while these tools may be sufficient when translators work in a familiar domain, more domainspecific examples are often needed to handle unfamiliar terms and collocations in specialized areas. complementing mt and tm, bilingual corpora allow translators to consult existing examples in context to evaluate the appropriateness of a candidate translation @xcite . even so, many translators never used corpora @xcite . translation students were more familiar with mt and tm than corpora, which are accessible only to a minority @xcite . it is therefore worthwhile to evaluate the potential of this underused resource as pedagogical tool. ## research questions this paper investigates the use of bilingual corpora for translation training in the specialized domain of technical writing, where the preponderance of rare terms and collocations makes translation aid critical. our study focuses on patents, whose translation market has been rapidly expanding as patents are filed in a greater variety of languages across the globe. we aim to address two research questions: self-learning via concordancing: are novice translators capable of improving translation drafts via independent concordancing with bilingual corpora? general-domain vs. in-domain bilingual data: are in-domain bilingual corpora more effective than general-domain corpora as pedagogical tools for translation? the rest of the paper is organized as follows. after a summary of previous work (section 3), we describe the corpus data in our study (section 4). we then present the design of our study, in which novice translators produced drafts with mt outputs and subsequently revised them via concordancing with general-domain and in-domain parallel corpora (section 5). finally, we report results (section 6) and conclude (section 7). ## previous work corpus use often requires proficiency with query languages and other technical skills. despite the learning curve, previous research suggests that corpora can be effective as pedagogical tools for language learning. @xcite demonstrated students' ability to induce different meanings of a chinese word with a chinese-english bilingual concordancer. @xcite showed that l2 learners can refine their writing, including word choices and word combinations, via a parallel concordancer without guidance from instructors. in a study by @xcite , up to 70% of the students were able to make corrections based on concordance feedback. a substantial number of the students became independent, persistent corpus users. bilingual corpora have been increasingly used in a variety of translation studies @xcite . research on corpus-driven translation training has investigated specialized domains such as insurance and legal texts @xcite . pedagogical benefits have been demonstrated in using bilingual corpora for english-spanish translation of insurance documents @xcite ). an online legal and documentary bilingual corpus has been shown to enhance self-learning of legal text @xcite . in a master's program in legal translation, students compiled a monolingual english corpus as an aid for spanish-to-english translation of judgments @xcite . to the best of our knowledge, no evaluation has been reported for corpus-based translation training in the domain of technical writing, likely due to a lack of bilingual data. this bottleneck has been eased with the compilation of patentlex @xcite , a large-scale collection of comparable chinese-english patents which will be used in our study. in-domain corpus composed of over 300k chinese and english patents, patentlex @xcite has served as the dataset for patent mt shared tasks such as those organized by ntcir workshops. our in-domain bilingual data consisted of over 30 million parallel bilingual sentences extracted from patentlex. ## results comparison among student versions. we first compare the translation accuracy of technical terms in the three student versions (section 5.2). the baseline version attained a higher accuacy (63.25%) than the general-domain version (62.80%). the slight decrease in accuracy suggests possible translation divergences between the general-domain data and the specialized domain of technical writing. in contrast, in-domain concordancing helped increase the accuracy to 65.12%, above the baseline. the in-domain version (0.2430) also outperformed the baseline (0.2290) in terms of bleu score. these results show that in-domain bilingual data can help novice translators revise the translation of technical terms, and can be more helpful than general-domain bilingual data. among the ten abstracts in the evaluation dataset, eight achieved higher accuracy in their in-domain version than in their general-domain counterpart. six of the ten abstracts yielded in-domain versions that outperformed the baseline version. mt vs. student versions. the mt outputs from google and baidu were more accurate in the translation of technical terms (66.25% and 69.65%, respectively) than the student versions, even after in-domain concordancing (65.12%). the bleu score reveals a similar gap, with google output (0.2519) and baidu the goal of this study is not to show that patentlex can help human translators outperform mt systems. human performance depends on a range of factors, including the translators' competence and their background in technical writing, as well as the patent content. as it turned out, for 5 of the 10 abstracts (marked with asterisks in ## conclusions we have presented the first evaluation on the use of bilingual corpora for translation training in technical writing. in a user study, novice translators translated english patent abstracts into chinese with assistance from bilingual examples in general-domain and in-domain corpora. results suggest that they were able to exploit bilngual data to improve translation quality of technical terms. an in-domain corpus of patents appears to be more effective as pedagogical tool than a general-domain corpus, with respect to both term translation accuracy and bleu score.