[Corpora-List] Translation errors in the EU Constitution

[Jean Veronis]

Dear all,

I have been alerted by Birt Aarskog, who has now created hypertextual
versions of the EU Constitution for en, fr, it, de :

http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/%7Ebrit/EU-CONST-EN-cc/
*http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/%7Ebrit/EU-CONST-FR-cc/
http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/%7Ebrit/EU-CONST-DE-cc/
http://gandalf.aksis.uib.no/%7Ebrit/EU-CONST-IT-cc/

*that there are serious translation problems among versions. Brit
spotted differences in cross-references between articles among these
languages, and it seems that there are some minor wording problems as well.

However, this prompted me to search in the news, and I found that for
some languages the situation is quite serious :

- in Poland, at least 40 severe errors have been found (as big as
confusing "qualified majority"and "simplemajority"), and the opposition
request for postoming the referendum

- in Latvia, the ratification process in Latvia has been suspended
because of these errors.

I have written more about this (in French, unfortunately):
http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2005/05/traduction-constitution-trahie.html

If you know about other problems I would love to hear about it!

Anyway, it occured to me that now that an aligned version exists (it was
announced on this list the other day : http://logos.uio.no/opus), an
interesting application would be to develop programs for the (semi?)
automatic verification of translations! Has anybody done this before?

--j
  http://aixtal.blogspot.com