Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Translation — translation and its theory — equivalence and its kinds (formal, dynamic, functional), interpretive resemblance, register and quality assessment, translation as skopos-driven action, intersemiotic translation between media, and what a translation preserves or changes (ADR-033).
19 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-766 v2 | Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language | Hofstadter (1997), Basic Books. A book-length meditation on translation, built around dozens of translations of Clément Marot’s short poem “A une Damoyselle malade”: translating is analogy-making under formal and semantic constraints, and no translation is neutral. Not read: no lawful full text was found. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text was found. The Internet Archive scan is lending-only (access-restricted, print-disabled and borrowable copies), HathiTrust has no record of it, and no author copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-784 v3 | Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context | Gutt (1991; 2nd ed. 2000), St. Jerome. Translation as interlingual interpretive use under Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory: a translation resembles the original in the inferences it lets an audience draw, and direct translation preserves the original’s communicative clues. Not read: no lawful full text was found. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from Crossref and catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text of either edition was found. HathiTrust holds the 2000 edition search-only, the Internet Archive holds no scan of either edition, and Routledge sells the reissue. Gutt’s 1989 University of London thesis of the same title is listed as open access at UCL Discovery, but it is a different work and was not read as this one. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-786 | On Linguistic Aspects of Translation | Jakobson (1959), in Brower (ed.), On Translation, Harvard University Press, pp. 232–239. The meaning of a sign is its translation into further signs; translation is intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic. Code-units rarely have full equivalents across languages, but messages can be adequately rendered: “equivalence in difference” is the cardinal problem. All cognitive content is conveyable in any language; languages differ in what they must convey, so obligatory categories force choices that add or drop information. Poetry, where grammar and sound carry meaning, allows only creative transposition. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-614): in full, from a scan of the 1959 printing posted as a course reading by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. Worth reading as the source of the three kinds of translation (intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic) and of the argument that interlingual translation substitutes whole messages for messages, since code-units rarely have full equivalents. Its sharpest claim is that languages differ in what they must convey, not in what they may convey: obligatory grammatical categories force a translator to add or drop information, so a chain of translations back and forth can strip a message of its content. Limits: an essay argued from examples, with one psychological test cited second-hand; poetry is set aside as untranslatable, open only to “creative transposition”. |
| LIT-789 v2 | Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present | House (2015; e-book 2014), Routledge. House’s account of evaluating translations: her 1977 model and its 1997 revision, a test case, the cultural filter in the light of contrastive pragmatics, globalization, corpus and cognitive research, and a new integrative model. Evaluation is first analysis and explanation, then judgement. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from Crossref, the Library of Congress and the publisher’s description, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Routledge sells the book, OpenAlex lists it as closed with no repository copy, and the Internet Archive holds no scan of this 2015 book (only House’s 1977 and 1997 books, lending-only). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-791 v2 | Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating | Nida (1964), E. J. Brill. A linguistic and communication-theoretic account of translating, built on Bible translation, whose chapter “Principles of Correspondence” sets formal equivalence (matching the message’s form and content) against dynamic equivalence (equivalent effect on the receptor). Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from Crossref, the Library of Congress and Open Library, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. HathiTrust holds the 1964 edition (mdp.39015005092666) as Limited (search-only); all six Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted); Brill sells the digital edition, which OpenAlex lists as closed. A PDF a web search returned on an unrelated organisation’s domain is not the publisher’s, an author’s or an institution’s and was not opened. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-799 v2 | Discourse and the Translator | Hatim & Mason (1990), Longman. Translation analysed as communication in a social context: register, the pragmatic dimension (text as action) and the semiotic dimension (text as sign), with intertextuality, text type and text structure, and the translator as a mediator between cultures. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from the Library of Congress, Open Library, Crossref and the publisher’s page, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. HathiTrust holds the 1990 edition (two copies) as Limited (search-only), the one Internet Archive scan is lending-only, and Routledge sells the reissue, which OpenAlex lists as closed. PDFs a web search returned on unrelated domains are not the publisher’s or the authors’ and were not opened. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-829 v2 | Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained | Nord (1997), St. Jerome. The first survey in English of the German functionalist approaches: Vermeer’s skopos theory and Holz-Mänttäri’s translational action, with applications to translator training, literary translation and interpreting, the criticisms, and Nord’s own “function plus loyalty”. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from the Library of Congress, Open Library and Crossref, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. HathiTrust holds the 1997 edition as Limited (search-only), the one Internet Archive scan is lending-only, and Routledge sells the 2014 reissue and the later editions. A slide-sharing upload offered by a web search is not the publisher’s or the author’s and was not opened. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-941 v2 | A Theory of Unsupervised Translation Motivated by Understanding Animal Communication | Goldwasser et al. (2022; NeurIPS 2023). A theoretical framework for unsupervised translation with no parallel data and no assumption that the corpora share domain or structure: maximum likelihood against a prior that scores how plausible a target text is. In two stylised random models it proves error bounds that fall with common ground, source-language complexity and samples, with a matching lower bound in one, err = O(log|Θ| / (α·min(m,|T|))), and checks them on synthetic data. Information-theoretic, lossless and uniform. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-804) in full; worth reading as the first theory of translation without parallel data: maximum likelihood against a plausibility prior learns the translator with an Occam-type bound divided by the common ground, err = O(log|Θ| / (α·min(m,|T|))) in its common-nonsense model, tight up to a constant. Read it knowing that its models are uniform, random and lossless, that the bounds are information-theoretic, and that the prior substitutes for parallel data in learning a decoder, not for information in a message. Filed THEORY-270; bears on QUESTION-020 without answering it. |
| LIT-997 v3 | How LLMs Distort Our Written Language | Abdulhai et al. (2026). Three studies of LLM-assisted writing. In a randomized essay study, heavy LLM users rated their essays less in their own voice, and an LLM judge labelled 66.7% of their essays neutral against 39.5% of controls. LLM revisions of 86 essays from 2021 moved further, and in one shared direction, in embedding space than the authors’ own revisions, under every prompt including “Revise this essay for grammar”. LLM-written ICLR 2026 reviews named clarity and relevance less often and reproducibility more. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-750) in full; worth reading as a measured case of rewriting that keeps topic and genre and moves stance, voice and evaluative emphasis. Heavy LLM use in an essay task made judge-labelled neutral stances 68.9% more common, and LLM revisions of 2021 student essays moved them further, and in one shared direction, in embedding space than the students’ own revisions did. Read it knowing that meaning is measured by sentence-embedding position and an LLM judge, never by the writers; that the “grammar” prompt was “Revise this essay for grammar” given with content feedback; and that the main semantic result is shown in plots without statistics. Its abstract’s “full point higher” review scores are 4.43 against 4.13 in the body. |
| LIT-1302 | Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith | Supreme Court of the United States (2023), No. 21-869, 598 U.S. 508, opinion of the Court by Sotomayor, 7–2. The first fair-use factor weighs against the Warhol Foundation’s 2016 licence of Orange Prince to a Prince tribute magazine: the licence and Goldsmith’s photograph share substantially the same purpose, illustrating magazine stories about Prince, and the use is commercial. New meaning or message is relevant only to whether the purpose differs and is not enough by itself. Gorsuch concurs; Kagan, dissenting, would count Warhol’s added expression and meaning heavily. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1019) in full; worth reading as the Supreme Court’s statement that “transformative” use under the first fair-use factor is a question of the purpose of a particular use, a matter of degree, and not settled by new expression, meaning or message; that the degree of transformation must exceed what the derivative-work right already covers; that copying is justified most clearly when the copied work is the target (parody against satire); and that licensing markets for derivatives belong to the owner. Kagan’s dissent is the best short case for meaning and aesthetics as the measure. Read it knowing that it decides one factor only, for one use (the 2016 licence of Orange Prince to Condé Nast), and says nothing about the making, display or sale of the Prince Series, nor whether they infringe. |
| LIT-1303 | Worth a Thousand Words: The Images of Copyright | Tushnet (2012). Copyright takes the written word as its model. Courts treat images either as transparent, so that their meaning is obvious and they merely copy reality, or as opaque, so that they cannot be analysed in words. The oscillation produces incoherent doctrine on copyrightability, substantial similarity, joint authorship of comics and fair use. Verbal overshadowing means that describing an image changes how it is seen, so the substantial-similarity test should be abandoned for a reproduction right against exact or near-exact copies. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1016) in full; worth reading as the standard statement that copyright law takes the written word as its model and so oscillates between treating images as transparent (their meaning obvious, a copy of reality) and as opaque (beyond analysis in words), of verbal overshadowing as a reason the substantial-similarity test cannot work, and of the proposal to replace that test with a reproduction right against exact or near-exact copies, leaving the rest to the derivative-works right. Read it knowing that it is US law as of 2011, that the cognitive findings are cited from the psychology literature rather than tested on legal factfinders, that the author flags the verbal-overshadowing effect as possibly smaller than first reported, and that the reform is stated without its implementation (n. 258). |
| LIT-1798 v2 | PETra: A Multilingual Corpus of Pragmatic Explicitation in Translation | Osmelak et al. (2026). A released corpus of about 3,000 English-source sentence pairs from TED-Multi and Europarl in twelve target languages, in which the translation adds or replaces material to make culture-bound knowledge explicit: unit conversions, entity descriptions and specifications, translator glosses, typed under a 19-subtype schema and marked as added or replacing. Candidates come from null alignments next to a named entity; a multilingual BERT classifier trained by active learning on German and Spanish found three quarters of the pairs, its accuracy rising 7–8 points over the cycles. Measurement conversion is the largest category. No inter-annotator agreement is reported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1344) from the LREC 2026 PDF; worth reading as the only multilingual corpus of the additions human translators make for a new audience, with each addition marked in the target, and for what it lacks: no reported annotator agreement. |
| LIT-1816 v2 | xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection | Guerreiro et al. (2023; TACL 2024). xCOMET, an open learned metric for machine translation, predicts from one XLM-R encoder a sentence-level score and a severity tag for each token, with or without a reference or source, and folds an MQM score computed from its own error spans into its final score. On WMT22 expert MQM it reaches segment-level Kendall τ of 0.42–0.43 and span F1 of 0.27–0.28, at or above the open metrics and GPT-4 prompting of its time, and it would have won the WMT23 metrics task. Its spans and its score agree at Pearson 0.73–0.92, far above either’s agreement with experts. Trained with synthetic hallucinations, it flags most injected critical errors and ranks fully detached hallucinations low. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1341) from the TACL version of record, with the arXiv v1 preprint compared; worth reading as the reference description of a strong open MT metric and its limits: segment-level Kendall τ near 0.43 against expert MQM, span F1 near 0.28, and score and spans that agree with each other far better than with the experts. |
| LIT-1817 v2 | VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages | Singh et al. (2026). 578 items written by four native speakers, one per language, in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Malayalam, over deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics and coherence, as disjoint MCQ, NLI and translation sets. Five LLMs score higher on MCQ than NLI in every model–language pair, and when wrong they pick the literal reading 59.1% of the time against 33.3% by chance. On 416 model translations, COMET correlates with one native rater per language at r = 0.81, better than XCOMET or MetricX, though hand-picked inverted translations score highly. The finding that translation “does not track” pragmatic understanding compares different items, and no inter-rater agreement is given. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1345) from the Findings of EMNLP 2026 PDF, with the released items counted; worth reading for its native-authored, culturally specific pragmatic items in four Indic languages and its evidence that LLM errors lean literal. Its translation and inference tasks use different items, and no agreement between people is reported. |
| LIT-1818 v2 | Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment of Word Embedding Spaces | Alvarez-Melis & Jaakkola (2018). Casts unsupervised word translation as a Gromov–Wasserstein problem between the two languages’ within-language cosine-similarity matrices, solved by entropic projected gradient with no anchors, and reads the optimal coupling as the translation. It matches adversarial-plus-refinement methods on related languages trained on comparable Wikipedia corpora (P@1 72–82) at about 4% of their CPU time, and does markedly worse on English–Russian (45) and English–Finnish (18). The objective sees only within-space relations, so it is unchanged by a rotation of either space and cannot distinguish couplings that differ by a symmetry of the data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1336); worth reading as the cleanest statement of correspondence recovered from within-space relations alone, and for what that costs: the objective cannot tell a correspondence from one composed with a symmetry of either space (THEORY-1133), which the paper does not say. |
| LIT-1819 v2 | On the Limitations of Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction | Søgaard, Ruder & Vulić (2018). Tests the adversarial unsupervised dictionary induction of Conneau et al. (2018) outside its reported conditions. It fails (P@1 ≈ 0) for English paired with Estonian or Finnish, also with a 1.7B-word Finnish corpus; across corpus domains, even for English–Spanish; and between a skip-gram and a CBOW space. A seed of identically spelled words does as well or better. A Laplacian-spectrum dissimilarity of 10-node nearest-neighbour graphs tracks success across eight pairs (|ρ| = 0.89; negative, since it is a dissimilarity), but is computed with the gold translations. About one seed in ten succeeds for Estonian, Finnish and Greek, so part of the failure is the optimiser. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1337); worth reading as the first systematic test of when unsupervised dictionary induction fails, and for its finding that whether two embedding spaces align depends on the corpus domain and the embedding algorithm as much as on the languages (THEORY-1145). The method tested is adversarial (Conneau et al. 2018), not GW. |
| LIT-1845 | Translation and Relevance | Gutt (1989), PhD thesis, University College London. Translation needs no theory of its own: it is interlingual interpretive use under Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory. Two utterances interpretively resemble each other to the degree that the explicatures and implicatures each conveys in its own cognitive environment overlap, and a translation is faithful when it resembles the original closely enough in the respects that make it adequately relevant to its audience, at no gratuitous processing cost. Direct translation, which preserves the original’s communicative clues, is the limiting case: complete interpretive resemblance in the cognitive environment the original envisaged. The precursor of the 1991 book (LIT-784). | Active — skimmed 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1435) from the UCL Discovery eprint (discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317504/1/241978.pdf, 309 pp., OCR text layer): the abstract, preface and contents, the critique of functional equivalence (pp. 22–27), the relevance-theoretic chapter’s account of interpretive resemblance (pp. 50–76), the critique of dynamic equivalence (pp. 118–130), all of chapter 5 on faithfulness as optimal resemblance (pp. 160–193), all of chapter 6 on communicative clues (pp. 194–248) and the opening of chapter 7 with its definition of direct translation (pp. 249–257). The rest is unread. Worth reading as the thesis that became Translation and Relevance (LIT-784), and as the only reading of Gutt’s account the record holds. On it, two utterances interpretively resemble each other to the degree that the assumptions each communicates in its own cognitive environment overlap, so resemblance is judged by what is communicated, not by wording or propositional form. A translation is faithful when it resembles the original closely enough in the respects that make it relevant to its audience. Direct translation is the limiting case, complete interpretive resemblance in the context the original envisaged. Read it as the 1989 thesis, not the book: what the book changed is unread. |
| LIT-1863 | Translating as a purposeful activity: a prospective approach | Nord (2005), TradTerm 11:15–28. A short statement of functionalist translation. Since a text is an offer of information that different receivers take differently, the translator works prospectively, toward the purpose the translation is to serve for a target audience under the brief. Communicative purposes are phatic, referential, expressive and appellative. Where target-culture conditions differ, each function is either adapted so it works (instrumental translation) or turned into a meta-function that explains how it worked (documentary translation), and the brief, not a general preference, decides which. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1448) from the publisher’s open-access PDF on the TradTerm site (periodicos.usp.br/tradterm/article/download/49673/53784/61052, 14 pp.). Worth reading as Nord’s own short statement of functionalist translation, the record’s only reading of the functional account while her book (LIT-829) is unread. A text is an offer of information, which different receivers take differently, so the translator works prospectively, toward the purpose the translation is to serve for a particular target audience as the brief specifies. Nord sorts communicative purposes into phatic, referential, expressive and appellative functions. Where target-culture conditions differ, the translator either adapts the text so that the function works (instrumental translation) or turns it into a meta-function that tells the audience how the original worked (documentary translation). Neither is better in general: the brief decides. Equivalence is often “not required or not even desired”. |
| LIT-1864 | Principles of Correspondence | Nida (1964), “Principles of Correspondence”, abridged in Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (2004), pp. 126–140. There is no exact translation, only closest equivalents, and there are two orientations. Formal equivalence reproduces the message’s form and content, as in a gloss translation with notes. Dynamic equivalence, “the closest natural equivalent to the source-language message”, aims at a receptor–message relationship “substantially the same” as the original receptors had, and so at a similar response. It must still reflect the source’s meaning and intent, and meaning comes before style. Its example is Phillips’s handshake for the “holy kiss” of Romans 16:16. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1451) from a course-reading PDF of the reprint (newuniversityinexileconsortium.org, “Week-6-Dynamic-equivalence-and-formal-equivalence-Nida-1964-in-Venuti-2004-1.pdf”, 15 pp., Reader pp. 126–140). Worth reading as the record’s only first-hand text of Nida’s two orientations, while Toward a Science of Translating (LIT-791), whose chapter this abridges, is unread. Formal equivalence matches the message in form and content. Dynamic equivalence aims at “the principle of equivalent effect”: “the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message”. Nida’s example is Phillips’s “hearty handshake all around” for Romans 16:16’s “holy kiss”. A dynamic-equivalence translation is “the closest natural equivalent to the source-language message”. It must still “clearly reflect the meaning and intent of the source”, and meaning takes priority over style. Read it as an abridgement whose cuts are not marked. |