Observations on the Annotation of Discourse Relational Devices in TED Talk Transcripts in Lithuanian

Abstract

Lithuanian researchers are working on enriching the existing corpora; they are also looking for ways to make the corpora inter-operable and co-searchable through the annotation of discourse relations. One of the goals of the present research is working on the annotation of discourse relations in TED talks transcripts translated into Lithuanian and expanding the set of available resources in the Lithuanian language. A second goal is to compare cross-linguistically the annotated texts with the view of looking for translation tendencies in rendering discourse relations in the Lithuanian language. This, we believe, will open up a new research path in digital humanities leading to an understanding of translation tendencies in TED talks transcripts across languages. According to our research results, noteworthy translation tendencies embrace explicitation - a tendency to use more explicitly marked discourse relations in Lithuanian than the original transcripts, verbatim translations of discourse connectives, and also a tendency to use fewer alternative lexicalizations (a type of discourse-relational devices).