PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

Chapter 3. Tracking English Inclusions in German 51
Internet Space EU
Token f Token f Token f
Internet 106 ISS 126 DCEI 11
Online 71 Nasa 96 Nato 3
UMTS 32 Shuttle 35 Cluster 3
Handy 24 Crew 32 Manager 2
Ebay 24 Esa 23 Business 2
Table 3.2: Five most frequent (f) English inclusions per domain.
Table 3.2 also contains examples of English words with established and frequently
used German equivalents such as Crew (Besatzung). The German translation of this
term occurred 27 times in the space data. Therefore, the German word was used 45.8%
and the English equivalent 54.2% of the time. English abbreviations such as ISS (In-
ternational Space Station) or acronyms like Esa (European Space Agency) are specific
cases of assimilated anglicisms as they are phonologically integrated in German.
A further interesting example listed in Table 3.2 is Handy, the word used by Ger-
mans for mobile phone. This is a pseudo-anglicism, a type of borrowing that is pro-
nounced as the lexical item of the donor language but where the meanings in the donor
and receiving languages differ. Although linguists disagree on pseudo-anglicisms be-
ing classed as borrowings, in this case an anglicism, it is clear that such instances
would not exist in the receiving language if they had not been derived from the lexical
item in the donor language. The word Handy, for example, originated from the Handy
Talkie, the first hand-held two-way radio developed in 1940 (Petrakis, 1965).
3.2.3 Inter-annotator Agreement
In any annotation project, some data is generally annotated by more than one annotator
in order to guarantee consistency. Double (or multiple) annotation is also vital to
determine how well defined a specific annotation task is, and how feasible it is for
humans to perform. Inter-annotator agreement (IAA), which is calculated on a set of
data annotated independently by different people, serves therefore as an upper bound
of what is achievable by any system.