Statistical Analysis of Missing Translation in Simultaneous Interpretation Using A Large-scale Bilingual Speech Corpus

Abstract

This paper describes statistical analyses of missing translations in simultaneous interpretations. Eighty-eight lectures from English-to-Japanese interpretation data from a large-scale bilingual speech corpus were used for the analyses. Word-level alignment was provided manually, and English words without corresponding Japanese words were considered missing translations. The English lectures contained 46,568 content words, 33.1\% of which were missing in the translation. We analyzed the relationship between missing translations and various factors, including the speech rate of the source language, delay of interpretation, part-of-speech, and depth in the syntactic structure of the source language. The analyses revealed that the proportion of missing translations is high when the speech rate is high and delay is large. We also found that a high proportion of adverbs were missed in the translations, and that words at deeper positions in the syntactic structure were more likely to be missed.

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