Found in Translation: Reconstructing Phylogenetic Language Trees from Translations

Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 530–540 Vancouver, Canada, July 30 - August 4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-1049 Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 530–540 Vancouver, Canada, July 30 - August 4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-1049 Found in Translation: Reconstructing Phylogenetic Language Trees from Translations Ella Rabinovich△⋆ Noam Ordan† Shuly Wintner⋆ △IBM Research Haifa, Israel ⋆Department of Computer Science, University of Haifa, Israel †The Arab College for Education, Haifa, Israel {ellarabi,noam.ordan}@gmail.com, shuly@cs.haifa.ac.il Abstract Translation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and lit- erature for thousands of years. Transla- tors have always tried to be invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in the target language. We show that traces of the source lan- guage remain in the translation product to the extent that it is possible to uncover the history of the source language by looking only at the translation. Specifically, we au- tomatically reconstruct phylogenetic lan- guage trees from monolingual texts (trans- lated from several source languages). The signal of the source language is so power- ful that it is retained even after two phases of translation. This strongly indicates that source language interference is the most dominant characteristic of translated texts, overshadowing the more subtle signals of universal properties of translation. 1 Introduction Translation has played a major role in human civ- ilization since the rise of law, religion, and trade in multilingual societies. Evidence of scribe trans- lations goes as far back as four millennia ago, to the time of Hammurabi; this practice is also men- tioned in the Bible (Esther 1:22; 8:9). For thou- sands of years, translators have tried to remain in- visible, setting a standard according to which the act of translation should be seamless, and its prod- uct should look as if it were written originally in the target language. Cicero (106-43 BC) com- mented on his translation ethics, “I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I pre- served the general style and force of the language.” These words were echoed 500 years later by St. Jerome (347-420 CE), also known as the patron saint of translators, who wrote, “I render, not word for word, but sense for sense.” Translator tendency for invisibility has peaked in the past 150 years in the English speaking world (Venuti, 2008), in spite of some calls for “foreignization” in trans- lations, e.g., the German Romanticists, especially the translations from Greek by Friedrich H¨olderlin (Steiner, 1975) and Nabokov’s translation of Eu- gene Onegin. These, however, as both Steiner (1975) and Venuti (2008) argue, are the exception to the rule. In fact, in recent years, the quality of translations has been standardized (ISO 17100). Importantly, the translations we studied in our work conform to this standard. Despite the continuous efforts of translators, translations are known to feature unique character- istics that set them apart from non-translated …

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