Concept

Interlinear gloss

Summary
In linguistics and pedagogy, an interlinear gloss is a gloss (series of brief explanations, such as definitions or pronunciations) placed between lines, such as between a line of original text and its translation into another language. When glossed, each line of the original text acquires one or more corresponding lines of transcription known as an interlinear text or interlinear glossed text (IGT)interlinear for short. Such glosses help the reader follow the relationship between the source text and its translation, and the structure of the original language. In its simplest form, an interlinear gloss is simply a literal, word-for-word translation of the source text. Interlinear glosses have been used for a variety of purposes over a long period of time. One common usage has been to annotate bilingual textbooks for language education. This sort of interlinearization serves to help make the meaning of a source text explicit without attempting to formally model the structural characteristics of the source language. Such annotations have occasionally been expressed not through interlinear layout, but rather, through enumeration of words in the object and meta language. One such example is Wilhelm von Humboldt's annotation of Classical Nahuatl: This "inline" style allows examples to be included within the flow of text, and for the word order of the target language to be written in an order which approximates the target language syntax. (In the gloss here, mache es is reordered from the corresponding source order to approximate German syntax more naturally.) Even so, this approach requires the readers to "re-align" the correspondences between source and target forms. More modern 19th- and 20th-century approaches took to glossing vertically, aligning the same sort of word-by-word content in such a way that the metalanguage terms were placed vertically below the source language terms. In this style, the given example might be rendered thus (here English gloss): Here word ordering is determined by the syntax of the object language.
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Related publications (5)

Pronoun Translation and Prediction with or without Coreference Links

Andrei Popescu-Belis, Lesly Sadiht Miculicich Werlen

The Idiap NLP Group has participated in both DiscoMT 2015 sub-tasks: pronoun-focused translation and pronoun prediction. The system for the first sub-task combines two knowledge sources: gram matical constraints from the hypothesized coreference links, and ...
2015

English-French Verb Phrase Alignment in Europarl for Tense Translation Modeling

Andrei Popescu-Belis, Thomas Meyer

This paper presents a method for verb phrase (VP) alignment in an English/French parallel corpus and its use for improving statistical machine translation (SMT) of verb tenses. The method starts from automatic word alignment performed with GIZA++, and reli ...
2014

Assessing the Accuracy of Discourse Connective Translations: Validation of an Automatic Metric

Andrei Popescu-Belis

Automatic metrics for the evaluation of machine translation (MT) compute scores that characterize globally certain aspects of MT quality such as adequacy and fluency. This paper introduces a reference-based metric that is focused on a particular class of f ...
Springer2013
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Related people (1)
Related concepts (3)
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
Gloss (annotation)
A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different. A collection of glosses is a glossary. A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by glossators, is called an apparatus. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics takes all aspects of language into account — i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as descriptive study of language, and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages.