Non-cognitive Tools of Translation

--- Jadhav Kaveri Narayanrao

Translation is the process of rendering a text from one language
into another. If we peep into the history of the translated literature, we find
that translation began only after the appearance of written literature. An
important role in history of translation has been played by of religious texts.
Firstly the religious texts were prominently translated.

Thereafter, the

scientific literature got the prominence and preference. Due to the demand
of business documentation consequent to the Industrial Revolution that
began in the mid-18th century, shift got changed to legal and business
documents. And at present, in the wake of globalization every genre of
literature is getting translated. As an effect of globalization, different groups
of people are coming together, bringing with them their own culture, values
and ethos. Translation has been playing an important role in bridging the
cultures and making this world a global village in true sense.
In the field of literature, we find that the literature is sustained
by the agency of translation. Translation promotes cosmopolitanism. Edith
Grossman, in her valuable little book Why Translation Matters1, has shown
how the very notion of literature would be inconceivable without translation.
Profession of the translation is becoming increasingly essential in the era of
globalization. With the increasing business demand, now a day, translation
has been developed as a full-fledged profession and some translation
associations and companies have cropped up with dedicated services. Every
bilingual person does a translation at either mental or explicit level.
Moreover, to show solidarity of the worldwide translation community in an
effort to promote the translation profession in different countries, an
International Translation Day is celebrated on 30th September. A literary

Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman, Yale University Press, 2010

critic George Steiner in his both seminal2 and controversial work After
Babel has stated that To understand is to decipher. And to hear is to
translate3 thus amplifying the very gamut of the translation and placing it
at the centre of all intellectual processes.
The Scope of the Paper:
The subject assigned to me for this seminar is Non-cognitive Tools of
Translation. Hence, it is imperative to first define the scope of the paper
before beginning with the subject-matter. The word non-cognitive indicates
the exclusion of cognitive tools of the translation. Cognition means the
mental faculty of acquiring knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition, or
perception or the knowledge acquired through these means (i.e. reasoning,
intuition, or perception). Cognitive means concerned with the acquisition of
knowledge viz. by the use of reasoning, intuition or perception or relating to
the thought process. Thus, the cognitive tools incorporate the actual
thought

process,

knowledge,

reasoning,

perception,

intuition,

etc.

Therefore, the non-cognitive tools indicate the tools other than these, i. e.
other than the actual thought process, knowledge, reasoning, perception,
intuition, etc. and which at the same time are helpful to the acquisition of
knowledge or to the thought process. Thus, the scope of this paper is to deal
with the tools other than the knowledge which are helpful to generate
knowledge and get the translation done. The tools, in themselves, in turn,
are the outcome of the knowledge. These tools can be either tangible or
intangible.

2A

work from which other works grow. The term usually refers to an intellectual or artistic
achievement whose ideas and techniques have been adopted or responded to in later works by
other people, either in the same field or in the general culture.

3After

Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford University Press, United

Kingdom,1975. He states that all human communication within and between the languages is
translation.

The Process of Translation :

To know the tools of translation, we should also know what the process of
translation involves. The Process of translation embraces restatement,
interpretation and transformation. The human translation process involves
two major steps, i.e.
1) Decoding the meaning of the source text; and
2) Re-encoding this meaning in the target language.
Behind this apparently simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation,
i.e. to decode the meaning of the source text (from which he is translating),
the translator has to have a good knowledge of grammar, semantics,
syntax, idioms, etc. of the source language, so that he will be able to
interpret and analyze the text.
1) The translator should also have a command over the target
language (the language into which he is translating) to re-encode the
meaning.
2) The translator should also have an acquaintance with the subject
matter of the text being translated;
Anything and everything that helps and improves this cognitive process
becomes a non-cognitive tool of the translation.

Non-cognitive Tools of Translation :

1) Translation does not mean substituting a word of one language by a

word

from

the

other

language.

It

involves

creativity,

prudence,

skillfulness and much more which an author has to have for a new
literary creation. In this sense, a translator can be equated with a
Sanskrit word Kavi. In Sanskrit texts nothing about a translator has
been told. But, texts on poetics have exhaustively dealt with the tools /
resources of a poet which are equally applicable to a translator. Three3

fold reasons/causes of the Kvya (EEh) have been told by the

rhetoricians. They are
given on

|i,

|i, i{k

and

+.

Though emphasis was

the importance of the latter two was equally recognized.

And they were reckoned not as causes but as a cause since all three
produce a good Kvya in unison.4 Rjaekhara has given eight causes of
the Kvya, which are good health, genius, repetitive study, devotion,
erudition,

knowledge

of

discussion

with

or

of

scholars,

firm

remembrance, and enthusiasm5.

Moreover, the ancient Indian scholars have laid down eight wellknown methods by which we may learn the meanings of words or the
relation between words and the objects denoted by them. They are as
follows -

CiO Eh{xE{iCniS*
C uknxi xvi& r{n r&**

(1) the usages of words by elders, (2) grammar, (3) analogy (4) lexicon, (5)
direct statement of a trust-worthy authority/person, (6) the rest of the
passage in the context (7) explanation (8) the syntactic connection.
Besides this, the importance of contextual factors in determining
the exact meaning of an expression has been emphasized by various
writers in India from very early times. Mammaa has given a list of such
contextual factors that determine the exact meaning of a word in the case
of ambiguous and equivocal expressions. They are as follows-

M |MS S vi*
+l& |Eh RM nx zv**
lSi n& E Ci& n&*
nlxSUn ii&**
4

Cix{hi EjEtIhi*
EYI <i iinn** |kij& ni& x i i&, i En xh x S ix i i&

Kvyapraka of Mammaa I.3

5

l |i CiuiEl ii*
infxnS i ]Ei** Kvyamim
s of Rjaekhara, V.

(1)

Sa
sarga

(contact)

or

sa
yoga

(association),

(2)

Viprayoga

(dissociation), (3) Shacarya (companionship) (4) Virodhit (opposition) (5)

Artha (the purpose served) (6) Prakaraa (context of situation) (7) Liga
(indication) (8) abdasynyasya sa
nidhi (the vicinity of another word)6.
These factors can be applicable to any language and will be helpful to
any translator while fixing the meaning of the words or phrases.
2) Dictionary, Glossary, Thesaurus, Lexicon :
Lexicon is generally be used to mean a Dictionary or a Glossary. But,
these reference books have slightly different denotations. Lexicon is
considered by some to be a more formal word for dictionary. Dictionaries
offer a breadth and depth in defining the words in a language whereas
glossary is a specialized vocabulary with definitions but does not provide
other information about the words. Glossaries are used to define a
precise set of words which make up the vocabulary of a set of people who
were grouped by a common interest, a profession or other circumstance,
such as glossary of medical science, Botany etc. A dictionary is a
reference book consisting of an alphabetically-arranged list of words with
their definitions, as well as any or all of the following forms such as
(spellings), pronunciations, functions (parts of speech), etymologies, and
syntactical and idiomatic uses. Thesaurus on the other hand provides us
with the synonym and antonyms of a word. Descriptive thesaurus also
contains adjectives suitable to the different shades of the meaning and
examples thereof. Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus entry does not give
the definition of words.
As far as Sanskrit lexicons are concerned we know that the
oldest such collection were arranged according to the meanings of the
words as in the first chapter of the Nighatu. Words with the same or
similar meaning were put together and were called synonyms. These

Kvyapraka of Mamama, II.19

collections

later

grew

into

synonymous

Halyudha, Hemachandra and such like.

Koa-s

like

Amarakoa,

We also have Koa-s which

deal with homonyms (anekrtha or nnrthaka) like Medinkoa.7 We

may conclude that the Classical Sanskrit Koa-s were not dictionaries in
the sense that the dictionaries we find today of other languages but they
were mere monolingual thesauruses.
3) Concordance - A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal
words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts.
Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a
concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance,
such as the Vedas, Bible, Quran or the works of Shakespeare, had
concordances prepared for them. Concordances are frequently used in
linguistics when studying a text. For example:

comparing different usages of the same word

analyzing keywords
analyzing word frequencies
finding and analyzing phrases and idioms
finding translations of sub-sentential elements, e.g. terminology, in
bitexts and translation memories
creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing).

Thus, concordance can be helpful as an indirect or secondary tool to

the

translation

in

limited

extend

of

the

ancient

text

whose

concordances have been prepared.

Although the basic process of translation has not gone through
significant changes in and of itself, it has always been adaptive to new
technologies and has embraced them quite readily.
4) Machine Translation : It is also known by its abbreviation MT. It is
a sub-field of computational linguistics. Machine translation (MT) is a
process whereby a computer program analyzes a source text and
produces a target text without human intervention. At the basic level,
7

Studies in Historical Sanskrit Lexicography, Mhendale, M.A., Deccan College, 1973

MT simply substitutes words in one natural language by words in

another, but that alone usually cannot produce a good translation of a
text since it fails to give a comprehensive and accurate meaning. This
technique is particularly effective in area where formal or formulaic
language is used. Thus, machine translation of government and legal
documents is more readily produced than the conversational or literary
texts. The quality of machine translation can be substantially improved
if the domain is restricted and controlled. In machine translation a
programme is to be developed that will understand a text as a person
does. Machine translation is essential in a linguistically diverse
country like India. A Brief Survey on Machine Translation in India has
been carried out by Durgesh Rao of National Centre for Software
Technology. As per his survey two specific examples of high volume
manual translation are translation of news from English into local
languages,

and

translation

of

annual

reports

of

government

departments and public sector units among, English, Hindi and local
languages. To ease and facilitate this work, a majority of the Indian
Machine Translation (MT) systems are for English-Hindi translation.
Some of them are as below :
4.1) Rule-based Machine Translation (RBMT) : It is also known as
Knowledge-based Machine Translation or Classical Approach of MT.
It denotes that machine translation systems is based on linguistic
information about source and target languages, basically gathered
from (bilingual) dictionaries and grammars, covering the semantic,
morphological, and syntactic rules of both language. Having input
sentences (in some source language), an RBMT system generates them
to output sentences (in some target language). Anglabharati software
deals with machine translation from English to Indian languages,
primarily Hindi, using a rule-based transfer approach. Two different
types of rule-based machine translation systems (RBMT) are given.
They are

1.1) Transfer Based Machine Translation Systems (RBMT) and

1.2) Interlingual RBMT Systems (Interlingua).
Both transfer-based and interlingua-based machine translation have
the same idea: to make a translation, it is necessary to have an
intermediate representation that captures the "meaning" of the original
sentence in order to generate the correct translation. In interlinguabased MT this intermediate representation must be independent of the
languages in question, whereas in transfer-based MT, it has some
dependence on the language pair involved. A high quality translation
with fair accuracy is possible with this process of translation, although
this is mainly dependent on the language pair in question, for example
the distance and closeness between the two.
4.2) Dictionary-based Machine Translation: Machine translation also
can use a method based on dictionary entries, which means that the
words will be translated as a dictionary does word by word, usually
without much correlation of meaning between them. Dictionary lookups may be done with or without morphological analysis. While this
approach to machine translation is probably the least sophisticated,
yet it is ideally suitable for the translation of long lists of phrases on
the sub-sentential (i.e., not a full sentence) level.
4.3)

Example-based

machine

translation:

It

is

essentially

translation by analogy. It is founded on the belief that people translate

firstly by decomposing a sentence into certain phrases, then by
translating these phrases and finally by properly composing these
fragments into one long sentence. Phrasal translations are translated
by analogy as per the previous translations available in the corpus.
The main problem arises with the MT when a word has more than one
meaning. Today there are numerous approaches designed to overcome
this problem. They can be approximately divided into "shallow"
approaches and "deep" approaches. Shallow approaches assume no
knowledge of the text. They simply apply statistical methods to the
words surrounding the ambiguous word. Deep approaches presume a
8

comprehensive knowledge of the word. So far, shallow approaches have

been more successful.
Machine translation has many more advantages like quickness,
economic, easy availability, confidentiality, universality, consistency,
etc. It is also marred by the disadvantages like lack of exactness,
accuracy,

difficulty

to

deal

with

ambiguous

words,

idiomatic

expressions and homonyms. Despite their inherent limitations, MT

programs are used around the world on large scale.

5) Computer-Assisted Translation :
Computer-assisted translation or computer-aided translation, or CAT
is a form of language translation in which a translator uses computer
software to support and facilitate the translation process.
Computer-assisted translation is sometimes also called machineassisted, or machine-aided, translation. It is different than Machine
Translation. It has emerged to salvage the short-comings of Machine
Translation. The automatic machine translation systems available
today are not able to produce high-quality translations. Their output
needs to be edited by a human to correct errors and improve phrasing.
Computer-assisted translation (CAT) incorporates that manual editing
stage

into

the

software.

intelligence.

This

type

professional

translators.

It

of

collaborates

technology

Some

is

human

and

machine

widely

used

amongst

translation

professional

service

providers claim their superior service by stating that they dont provide
MT but CAT. Computer-assisted translation is a broad and imprecise
term and covers a wide range of tools, from simple to the complicated
one. These can include spell checker, grammar checker, electronic
dictionaries, either unilingual or bilingual, full text search tool, bi-text
aligners, translation memory tool (consisting of a database of text
segments in a source language and their translations in one or more
target languages) and concordance.

Machine Translation Projects in India8 :

The machine translation is still in a nascent stage in India. The earliest
attempts in this direction were done in the early nineties. The
prominent among these were the projects at IIT Kanpur, University of
Hyderabad,
Development

NCST
in

Mumbai

Indian

and

CDAC

Languages

Pune.

(TDIL),

an

The

Technology

initiative

of

the

Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and Information

Technology, Government of India, has played an instrumental role by
funding these projects. Since the 90s, a few more projects have been
initiated. Some efforts from the private sector were also made; by
Super Infosoft Pvt Ltd and more recently by the IBM India Research
Lab. Some major projects are given below :
1) Anglabharati : It is machine added translation system deals with
machine translation from English to Indian languages, primarily Hindi,
using a rule-based transfer approach. It has been applied mainly in the
domain of public health. The project is primarily based at Indian
Institute of Technology, Kanpur and has been funded by Technology
Development

in

Indian

Languages

(TDIL),

an

initiative

of

the

Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and Information

Technology, Government of India.
2)

Anubharati : It is a recent project at IIT Kanpur, dealing with

template-based machine translation from Hindi to English.

3) Anusaaraka : The focus in Anusaaraka is not mainly on machine
translation, but on language Access between Indian languages. Using
principles of Pinian Grammar (PG), and exploiting the close
similarity of Indian languages. The system has mainly been applied for
childrens stories. The project originated at IIT Kanpur, and later
8

Machine Translation in India: A Brief Survey Durgesh Rao http://

www.elda.org/en/proj/scalla/SCALLA2001/SCALLA2001Rao.pdf & Translation
Resources, Services and Tools for Indian Languages Salil Badodekar, http://
www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/Translation-survey/survey.pdf

10

shifted mainly to the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation

Studies (CALTS), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Hyderabad. It was funded by TDIL.
4) MaTra : It is project of Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing

(C-DAC), Mumbai. It aims at machine aided translation

from English to Hindi. The focus is on the innovative use of manmachine synergy. The system breaks an English sentence into chunks,
analyzes the structure and displays the Hindi output. It is primarily
meant for translators, editors and content providers. Currently, it
works for simple sentences, and work is on to extend the coverage to
complex

sentences.

It

has

been

funded

by

TDIL.

5) Mantra : (MAchiNe assisted TRAnslation tool) Mantra translates

English text into Hindi in a specified domain of personal dministration,
specifically gazette notifications, office orders, office memorandums
and circulars. The MANTRA Technology is being expanded to translate
English texts into other Indian languages such as Gujarati, Bengali,
and Telugu. It is developed by Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC), Bangalore.
6)UNL-based

MT

between

English,

Hindi

and

Marathi:

The Universal Networking Language (UNL) is an international project of

the United Nations University, with an aim to create an Interlingua for
all major human languages. IIT Bombay is the Indian participant in
UNL, and is working on MT systems between English, Hindi and
Marathi using the UNL formalism. This essentially uses an interlingual approachthe source language is converted into UNL using an
enconverter, and then converted into the target language using a
deconverter.
7) English-Hindi MAT for news sentences : The Jadavpur University,
Kolkata has recently worked on a rule-based English-Hindi MAT for
news sentences using the transfer approach.
8) Anuvadak English-Hindi software: Super Infosoft Pvt Ltd is one of
the very few private sector efforts in MT in India. They have been
11

working on asoftware called Anuvadak, which is a general-purpose

English-Hindi

translation

tool

that

supports

post-editing.

9) English-Hindi Statistical MT : The IBM India Research Lab, New

Delhi has recently initiated work on statistical MT between English and
Indian languages, building on IBMs existing work on statistical MT.

Conclusion :

I have reckoned here some of the tools or resources needed and

available to a translator for accomplishing the task of translation. Each
of these has its own scope within which it renders the help to a
translator. Hence, mere one resource or tool will not suffice to gain the
desired result. Besides, each tool has its own advantages and
limitations. To overcome the limitation of one tool, we have to resort to
the other one. Moreover, we should not forget that these are noncognitive tools i.e. of secondary nature and translation being an
intellectual endeavour its main thrust is on cognitive tools. I am
reminded of a quote of Mammaa that all these cognitive and noncognitive tools form one hetu and the not hetava.
A lot of research is going on in the area of Natural Language
Processing (NLP) and a number of machine translation systems have
been

developed

and

regular

efforts

are

being

done

for

their

improvements. It is a call of the time that Sanskrit scholars get

adaptive to it for the dissemination of knowledge preserved in Sanskrit
language.

********

12