Translationese and Its Dialects

Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1318–1326, Portland, Oregon, June 19-24, 2011. c⃝2011 Association for Computational Linguistics Translationese and Its Dialects Moshe Koppel Noam Ordan Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science Bar Ilan University University of Haifa Ramat-Gan, Israel 52900 Haifa, Israel 31905 moishk@gmail.com noam.ordan@gmail.com Abstract While it is has often been observed that the product of translation is somehow different than non-translated text, scholars have empha- sized two distinct bases for such differences. Some have noted interference from the source language spilling over into translation in a source-language-specific way, while others have noted general effects of the process of translation that are independent of source lan- guage. Using a series of text categorization experiments, we show that both these effects exist and that, moreover, there is a continuum between them. There are many effects of translation that are consistent among texts translated from a given source language, some of which are consistent even among texts translated from families of source languages. Significantly, we find that even for widely unrelated source languages and multiple ge- nres, differences between translated texts and non-translated texts are sufficient for a learned classifier to accurately determine if a given text is translated or original. 1 Introduction The products of translation (written or oral) are generally assumed to be ontologically different from non-translated texts. Researchers have em- phasized two aspects of this difference. Some (Baker 1993) have emphasized general effects of the process of translation that are independent of source language and regard the collective product of this process in a given target language as an „in- terlanguage‟ (Selinker, 1972), „third code‟ (Fraw- ley, 1984) or „translationese‟ (Gellerstam, 1986). Others (Toury, 1995) have emphasized the effects of interference, the process by which a specific source language leaves distinct marks or finger- prints in the target language, so that translations from different source languages into the same tar- get language may be regarded as distinct dialects of translationese. We wish to use text categorization methods to set both of these claims on a firm empirical foun- dation. We will begin by bringing evidence for two claims: (1) Translations from different source languages into the same target language are sufficiently dif- ferent from each other for a learned classifier to accurately identify the source language of a given translated text; (2) Translations from a mix of source languages are sufficiently distinct from texts originally writ- ten in the target language for a learned classifier to accurately determine if a given text is translated or original. Each of these claims has been made before, but our results will strengthen them in a number of ways. Furthermore, we will show that the degree of difference between translations from two source languages reflects the degree of difference between the source languages themselves. Translations from cognate languages differ from non-translated texts in similar ways, while translations from unre- lated languages differ from non-translated texts in distinct ways. The same result holds for …

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