Article Details

Title Towards the Creation of a Poetry Translation Mapping System
Authors Meyer-Sickendiek, Burkhard and Hussein, Hussein and Baumann, Timo
Year 2018
Volume 5(1)
Abstract The translation of poetry is a complex, multifaceted challenge: the translated text should communicate the same meaning, similar metaphoric expressions, and also match the style and prosody of the original poem. Research on machine poetry translation is existing since 2010, but for four reasons it is still rather insufficient: 1. Thefewapproachesexistingcompletelylackanyknowledgeaboutcurrent developments in both lyric theory and translation theory. 2. Theyarebasedonverysmalldatasets. 3. They mostly ignored the neural learning approach that superseded the long-standing dominance of phrase-based approaches within machine translation. 4. They have no concept concerning the pragmatic function of their research and the resulting tools. Our paper describes how to improve the existing research and technology for poetry translations in exactly these four points. With regards to 1) we will describe the “Poetics of Translation”. With regards to 2) we will introduce the Worlds largest corpus for poetry translations from lyrikline. With regards to 3) we will describe first steps towards a neural machine translation of poetry. With regards to 4) we will describe first steps towards the development of a poetry translation mapping system.