从信息瓶颈视角分析翻译中空间介词的效率，发现人类译者偏好更优的表达平衡。
Translation from the Information Bottleneck Perspective: an Efficiency Analysis of Spatial Prepositions in Bitexts
- 将翻译建模为信息瓶颈优化问题，用源句和目标句分析语义压缩效率。
- 基于35人问卷和相似性判断，模型预测相关性达0.78，验证方法可行性。
- 译文比虚构版本更接近最优复杂度-准确率边界，体现语言使用的效率压力。
高效沟通需在信息量与简洁性之间取得平衡。信息瓶颈（IB）框架形式化地刻画了这一权衡，预测自然语言系统会聚集在最优的准确率-复杂度前沿。尽管该理论在颜色、运动等视觉领域得到支持，但句子语境中的词汇等语言刺激仍缺乏研究。本文将翻译视为一个IB优化问题，把源句作为刺激，目标句作为压缩后的意义表示，从而直接在双语语料（bitexts）上进行IB分析，而非依赖受控命名实验。研究聚焦于法语小说在英、德、塞尔维亚语翻译中空间介词的表现。通过一项包含35名参与者的堆叠排序预实验，获取介词对之间的语义相似性判断。训练了一个低秩投影模型（维度D=5），可预测这些判断，其斯皮尔曼相关系数达0.78。实际译文中空间介词的位置比反事实替代方案更接近IB最优前沿，初步表明人类译者在空间语义表达中存在沟通效率的压力。更广泛而言，本研究提示翻译可作为观察跨语言语义系统认知效率机制的窗口。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Efficient communication requires balancing informativity and simplicity when encoding meanings. The Information Bottleneck (IB) framework captures this trade-off formally, predicting that natural language systems cluster near an optimal accuracy-complexity frontier. While supported in visual domains such as colour and motion, linguistic stimuli such as words in sentential context remain unexplored. We address this gap by framing translation as an IB optimisation problem, treating source sentences as stimuli and target sentences as compressed meanings. This allows IB analyses to be performed directly on bitexts rather than controlled naming experiments. We applied this to spatial prepositions across English, German and Serbian translations of a French novel. To estimate informativity, we conducted a pile-sorting pilot-study (N=35) and obtained similarity judgements of pairs of prepositions. We trained a low-rank projection model (D=5) that predicts these judgements (Spearman correlation: 0.78). Attested translations of prepositions lie closer to the IB optimal frontier than counterfactual alternatives, offering preliminary evidence that human translators exhibit communicative efficiency pressure in the spatial domain. More broadly, this work suggests that translation can serve as a window into the cognitive efficiency pressures shaping cross-linguistic semantic systems.
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