French class project summaries 11/14/12
1. Lily (Team D)
a. Text: Cinderella
b. Do the aspects of culture translate?
c. Is the reading level the same in the original and translation?
i. Lexical complexity
d. **Compare number of adjectives, words used in original and translation to see if
stylistics of work stays constant
i. Ratio of parts of speech
e. Words (like fur and glass) whose French words are similar, so would translate differently
in English
2. Maria (Team A)
a. Text: Something about cream
b. See how translation changes stylistics
i. Number of adjectives in English vs French
ii. Composed words
iii. Phrases that don’t end with punctuation
1. Check for \n or a conjunction? No verbs after a certain number of
words? Blank lines?
2. Phrases that end with ellipses
a. The end of a sentence or a pause within a sentence?
b. Use of ellipses vs. periods
c. Framed narrative
3. Corrinne (Team D?)
a. Text: The Nutcracker
b. Which version is better?
i. Number of adjectives
ii. Ratio of parts of speech
c. Using the ballet? Or stories based off the ballet?
i. No dialogue in ballet, but maybe verbs and adjectives
d. Two texts in French, or one in French and one in English?
4. Julie (Team D?)
a. Text: Amay lee (film)
b. Cultural differences seen through characters who finish each other’s sentences, and
proverbs
c. Narrator provides description
d. Are the actual lines more complex than the English subtitles?
e. Reading level of the film (Original French script vs subtitles)
5. Rachel (Team C)
a. Text: Beauty and the Beast
b. Compare unique word count between French and translation
i. Lexical complexity
6. Erin (Team B)
a. Text: La main
b. Translate one paragraph multiple times, to see which is superior
i. Professional translation, Google translate, self-translate
ii. Computer science: word count, how words are used, parts of speech identified
7. Rosie (Team B)
a. Text: Tell-Tale-Heart
b. Can the translation get the tone?
i. Word count, sentence count, paragraph structure
ii. Sentiment analysis (need a corpus from French students)
c. If a certain word is used multiple times, is it translated the same way every time?
8. Diego
a. Text: Le Bisou
b. Simple text
c. Look for ambiguity between languages (like gender-specific articles, words with no
direct translation)
i. Ambiguity depends on context
ii. Can the computer learn how to detect ambiguity?
iii. Way’s idea: Translate French  English  French and see if that helps point out
ambiguity
9. Joanna
a. Text: The Plague
b. Text is about the absurdity of the human condition, via a narrator who tries to be
objective by using a specific pronoun (“on”) which can either mean “we” or passive
voice
c. Count how many times the pronoun shows up throughout the text; maybe when it’s
more frequent when it’s passive voice, less frequent as we
i. French idea: Add some other imperfect words to search for passive passages
(similar vague, personless expressions)
d. What words will appear in a sentence that could indicate that the pronoun is specific or
passive?
10. Meghan (Team B)
a. Text: Democracy in America
b. What are the political implications of translation?
i. Raw statistics
ii. Qualitative research of the role of translation in analysis of text
11. ??
a. Text: Le horla
b. Classify words according to their traits
i. Ie: concrete vs abstract nouns
c. Count number of verbs
i. Maybe fewer verbs because it’s a psychological, not active work
d. Count number of punctuations that split sentences up, capital letters, dashes
i. Ambiguities from abbreviations or contractions?
12. Anna (Team C)
a. Text: Le horla
b. How the tone of horror is created?
c. Break story into four categories: dialogue, narrator, action, description
i. For each category, count parts of speech ratios, list most frequent words in each
POS
13. Carolin? (Team C)
a. Text:
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
b. Break story into three sections: Frame, narrator describing framed story, action in
framed story
i. Analyze avg length of sentence in each section
ii. Count number of adjectives in each section
c. Length of sentences in French vs English
Cat (Team C)
a. Text:
b. Story told in retrospect
c. Break story into sections based on what is happening
i. Count number of adj, POS in each section
d. Story takes place during war in Africa
i. Sentiment analysis to see if story betrays how the author feels about the
situation
Chris
a. Text: Marketing article
b. Adj and adv, superlatives, word count, sentiment analysis
c. Placement of text on the material, which phrases are bolded
i. What is most important to consumers from separate cultures?
ii. Way’s idea: in txt file, highlight words that were bolded using html markup (<b>
and </b>)
Shaniqua
a. Text: Fleurx de mal
b. Text is a group of poems
c. Program should take literature and summarize it, like sparknotes, to be easier to teach.
i. Chris’ idea: summly  app that summarizes news articles
ii. Maybe take a few sentences to come up with an idea of what it’s all about
iii. Maybe highlight adjectives for sentiment analysis to extract tone of poem
Olivia
a. Text: The Guest
b. Tone
i. Does translator use tone to translate words, or do accurate word-by-word
translation?
c. Reading level
i. Determine intended audience of the author
d. Repetition of specific words
i. Effect on English and French versions
Liz
a. Texts: Declaration of rights of Man, Declaration of rights of Women
b. What overlaps between texts?
i. Most frequent words in both texts
c. Keywords (Free, liberty, rights) and how often they occur
d. Number of adjectives and nouns
i. Is one more emotive than the other? Logical?