An analysis of translational complexity in two text types

This article presents an empirical study where translational complexity is related to a notion of computability. Samples of English-Norwegian parallel texts have been analysed in order to estimate to what extent the given translations could have been produced automatically, assuming a rule-based approach to machine translation. The study compares two text types, fiction and law text, in order to see how these differ with respect to the question of automatisation. A central assumption behind the empirical method is that a specific translation of a given source expression can be predicted, or computed, provided that the linguistically encoded information in the original, together with information about source and target languages, and about their interrelations, provides the information needed to produce that specific target expression. The results of the investigation indicate that automatic translation tools may be helpful in the case of the law texts, and the study concurs with the view that the usefulness of such tools is limited with respect to fiction. Finally, an extension of the analysis method is proposed in order to make it relevant as a diagnostic tool for the feasibility of automatic translation in relation to specific text types.