Simplified or not Simplified? The Different Guises of Mediated English at the European Parliament
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article we describe a framework for the corpus-based comparative investigation of interpreting and translation, illustrating it through a study of simplification across different modes of language production and across different language pairs. We rely on EPTIC, a corpus featuring plenary speeches at the European Parliament in their interpreted and translated versions, aligned to each other and to their source texts in English<=>Italian and English<=>French. Aiming to shed light on lexical simplification in different mediation modes, we compare interpretations and translations to each other and to comparable original speeches and their edited written versions. Specifically, we compare lexical features (lexical density, type-token ratio, core vocabulary and list head coverage) in interpreting and translation into English from French and Italian, both in a monolingual comparable perspective and an intermodal perspective. Our results do not unconditionally support the simplification hypothesis: lexical simplification is observed in mediated English, but is found to be greater when the source language is French, and in interpretations rather than translations. We conclude that this feature is contingent on both the mediation mode and the source languages involved, and that the influence of the latter seems to be stronger than that of the former.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".