Cover not available

Article published In: From Disruptions to New Beginnings: The evolution of translation (studies) through technologies
Edited by Federico Gaspari and Silvia Bernardini
[Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 11:3] 2025
► pp. 334–360

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Navigating translation equivalence in news corpora

Construction and analysis of a comparallel Greek-English corpus on migration

 | University of Bologna
 | University of Bologna
Published online: 19 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.00171.fer
Abstract
This article introduces a method to identify and classify translation equivalences in multilingual news texts and applies it to the task of creating a corpus for the study of news translation, a notably challenging area within Translation Studies. The dataset is composed of 41 Greek-English news dispatches on the topic of migration by AMNA, the Greek national news agency. Conceptually, we build on previous research on ‘comparallel’ corpus architectures, which bring together features of comparable and parallel corpora and provide the necessary flexibility to account for the non-prototypical translated data characterizing multilingual news. The automated method uses state-of-the art Natural Language Processing techniques, namely sentence and word embeddings, which make it possible to account for nuanced translation relationships, distinguishing between translated, partially translated, related, and unrelated sentence pairs. We test the method against a benchmark of manually annotated sentences from the AMNA dataset and provide examples of correctly and incorrectly classified sentence pairs. We finally build a fully-fledged comparallel corpus based on the dataset and present a case study demonstrating how the corpus can be leveraged for corpus-assisted studies of news discourse, and most notably to investigate newsworthiness and ideological shifts occurring in multilingual news.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
    • 2.1News translation
    • 2.2Corpora of non-prototypical translation data
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The four-way classification of translation relationships
    • 4.2Performance evaluation
    • 4.3Error analysis
  • 5.Case study: Using a comparallel corpus to investigate newsworthiness and shifts
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
References
Artetxe, Mikel, and Holger Schwenk. 2019. “Margin-Based Parallel Corpus Mining with Multilingual Sentence Embeddings.” In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 3197–3203. Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barrón-Cedeño, Alberto, Cristina España-Bonet, Josu Boldoba, and Lluís Màrquez. 2015. “A Factory of Comparable Corpora from Wikipedia.” In BUCC@ACL/IJCNLP 3–13. Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bassnett, Susan. 2005. “Bringing the News Back Home: Strategies of Acculturation and Foreignisation.” Language and Intercultural Communication 5 (2): 120–130. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baumann, Gerd, Marie Gillespie, and Annabelle Sreberny. 2011. “Transcultural Journalism and the Politics of Translation: Interrogating the BBC World Service.” Journalism 12 (2): 135–142.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika, and Helen Caple. 2017. The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernardini, Silvia, Adriano Ferraresi, Federico Garcea, and Natalia Rodriguez-Blanco. 2024. “Corpus Approaches to News Translation: We Can Do Better Than Comparable!” Across Languages and Cultures 25 (2): 198–215. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernardini, Silvia, Sara Castagnoli, Adriano Ferraresi, Federico Gaspari, and Eros Zanchetta. 2010. “Introducing Comparapedia: A New Resource for Corpus-Based Translation Studies.” Paper Presented at the UCCTS 2010 Conference, Edgehill University, UK.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bielsa, Esperança. 2007. “Translation in Global News Agencies.” Target 19 (1): 135–155.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brook, Johnathan. 2012. The Role of Translation in the Production of International Print News. Three Case Studies in the Language Direction Spanish to English. PhD diss. University of Auckland.
Caimotto, Maria Cristina, and Federico Gaspari. 2018. “Corpus-Based Study of News Translation: Challenges and Possibilities.” Across Languages and Cultures 19 (2): 205–220.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carpenter, John C., and Sujatha Sosale. 2019. “The Role of Language in a Journalistic Interpretive Community.” Journalism Practice 13 (3): 280–297. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davier, Lucile, and Luc van Doorslaer. 2018. “Translation without a Source Text: Methodological Issues in News Translation.” Across Languages and Cultures 19 (2): 241–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davier, Lucile. 2014. “The Paradoxical Invisibility of Translation in the Highly Multilingual Context of News Agencies.” Global Media and Communication 10 (1): 53–72. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2021. “Translation in the News Agencies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media, ed. by Esperança Bielsa, 183–198. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. “Translating News.” In the Cambridge Handbook of Translation, ed. by Kirsten Malmkjær, 401–420. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Federmann, Christian, Tom Kocmi, and Ying Xin. 2022. “NTREX-128 — News Test References for MT Evaluation of 128 Languages.” In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Scaling up Multilingual Evaluation, 21–24. Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feng, Fangxiaoyu, Yinfei Yang, Daniel Cer, Naveen Arivazhagan, and Wei Wang. 2022. “Language-Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding.” In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 878–891. Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gaspari, Federico. 2013. “A Phraseological Comparison of International News Agency Reports Published Online: Lexical Bundles in the English-Language Output of ANSA, Adnkronos, Reuters and UPI.” Varieng. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 13 (1). [URL]
. 2015. “Exploring Expo Milano 2015: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Food-Related Phraseology in Translation Using a Comparallel Corpus Approach.” The Translator 21 (3): 327–349. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hernández-Guerrero, María José. 2022. “The Translation of Multimedia News Stories: Rewriting the Digital Narrative.” Journalism 23 (7): 1488–1508.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holland, Robert. 2013. “News Translation.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. by Carmen Millán, and Francesca Bartrina, 332–346. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kontos, Petros, and Maria Sidiropoulou. 2012. “Socio-Political Narratives in Translated English-Greek News Headlines.” Intercultural Pragmatics 9 (2): 195–224.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, Siyou, Longyue Wang, and Chao-Hong Liu. 2018. “Chinese-Portuguese Machine Translation: A Study on Building Parallel Corpora from Comparable Texts.” In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Panou, Despoina. 2014. Idiom Translation in the Financial Press: A Corpus-Based Study. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pęzik, Piotr, and Łukasz Grabowski. 2023. “Towards a Near-Parallel Corpus of News Texts: An Experiment in Using Multilingual Sentence Embeddings.” Paper presented at the PACOR 2023 Conference, University of León, Spain.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rodriguez-Blanco, Natalia. 2024a. “Distance and Closeness in Translated Global News Coverage: Bilingual Representations of Culture-bound themes from Bolivia to the World.” Perspectives 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2024b. Translational and Discursive Processes in Multilingual News Production by Global News Agencies: Representations about Bolivia. PhD diss., University of Bologna.
Schäffner, Christina. 2010. Political Discourse, Media and Translation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sharjeel, Muhammad, Iqra Muneer, Sumaira Nosheen, Rao Nawab, Adeel Muhammad, and Paul Rayson. 2023. “Cross-lingual Text Reuse Detection at Document Level for English-Urdu Language Pair.” ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing 22 (6): 173:1–173:22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sidiropoulou, Maria. 2020. “Introduction: Im/Politeness and Theatre Translation.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 6 (1): 1–8. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valdeón, Roberto A. 2015. “Fifteen Years of Journalistic Translation Research and More.” Perspectives 23 (4): 634–662. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020. “On the Interface between Journalism and Translation Studies: A Historical Overview and Suggestions for Collaborative Research.” Journalism Studies 21 (12): 1644–1661.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2022. “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Journalistic Translation.” Journalism 23 (7): 1397–1410.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vamvas, Jannis, and Rico Sennrich. 2022. “NMTScore: A Multilingual Analysis of Translation-Based Text Similarity Measures.” In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, 198–213. Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Doorslaer, Luc. 2010. “The Double Extension of Translation in the Journalistic Field.” Across Languages and Cultures 11 (2): 175–188. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wołk, Krzysztof, Emilia Rejmund, and Krzysztof Marasek. 2015. “Harvesting Comparable Corpora and Mining Them for Equivalent Bilingual Sentences Using Statistical Classification and Analogy-Based Heuristics.” In International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS 2015), ed. by Floriana Esposito, Olivier Pivert, Mohand-Saïd Hacid, Zbigniew Rás, and Stefano Ferilli, 433–441. Berlin: Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue