Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability Effects (2023)

Abstract: This paper explores the readability of translated and interpreted texts compared to the original source texts and target language texts in the same domain. It was shown in the literature that translated and interpreted texts could exhibit lexical and syntactic properties that make them simpler, and hence, easier to process than their sources or comparable non-translations. In translation, this effect is attributed to the tendency to simplify and disambiguate the message. In interpreting, it can be enhanced by the temporal and cognitive constraints. We use readability annotations from the Newsela corpus to formulate a number of classification and regression tasks and fine-tune a multilingual pre-trained model on these tasks, obtaining models that can differentiate between complex and simple sentences. Then, the models are applied to predict the readability of sources, targets, and comparable target language originals in a zero-shot manner. Our test data – parallel and comparable – come from English-German bidirectional interpreting and translation subsets from the Europarl corpus. The results confirm the difference in readability between translated/interpreted targets against sentences in standard originally-authored source and target languages. Besides, we find consistent differences between the translation directions in the English-German language pair.

## introduction cross-lingual mediation is known to be a specific type of communication, where a message in one language is rendered into the other language either in spoken or written mode. the documents produced as a result of interpreting and translation were shown to have specific linguistic patterns, which makes them distinct from comparable originally-authored (non-mediated) documents. distinctive features of translated language, usually captured by statistical analyses, are traditionally referred to as translationese. recent studies based on interpreting data demonstrated that the outcomes of cross-lingual mediation in the written and spoken modes are very dissimilar in their linguistic properties. the term interpretese was introduced to refer to the specificity of linguistic choices in interpreting. in the literature, some trends in translational behaviour (in particular, simplification, explicitation and normalisation) are in part explained by a conscious strategy or subconscious tendencyto clarify the communicative intent of the source text for the target audience @xcite , and to improve document readability @xcite . in simultaneous interpreting studies, simplification is viewed as a part of the coping strategy to mitigate the temporal and cognitive constraints imposed by the process. @xcite found that simultaneous interpreting emphasises the spoken features of the language, which can contribute to simplification. theoretically, in terms of the readability outcomes of the mediation process, the effects of simplification, normalisation and explicitation together can be overcome by interference, a tendency which was more recently shown to have the stronger influence on the properties of translation @xcite @xcite . this study aims to estimate the integral impact of cross-lingual mediation on the readability of translated and interpreted texts. for the purposes of this study, we do not make a distinction between readability and complexity/simplicity, assuming that the texts that are easier to read are also less complex, and vice versa, the texts that are simpler on any linguistic level are also easier to read. this assumption is often made in the related literature. unlike a lot of previous work, this study relies on a computational, modelling-driven approach instead of corpus-based and statistical methods. the readability of translated and interpreted segments is captured as dependent on their respective sources and is contrasted with originally-authored data in the target language. the paper presents the results of two experiments comparing mediated segments (a) to their aligned sources and (b) to comparable originals (non-mediated segments) in the target language. depending on the experimental setup, we train neural models that can distinguish original and simplified versions of the same segment or predict the readability level/score of unaligned segments with unrelated content, and apply these models to translated/interpreted segments aligned with their sources or to target language segments annotated as originals or mediated, respectively. if mediated language is simpler than sources, we expect the model to recognise the target segments in an aligned segment pair as simpler/more readable than the respective source. if mediated language is simpler than comparable non-mediated language in the target language, we expect mediated segments to get lower readability scores, signalling lower complexity. the results are reported with regard to the mediation mode (written or spoken) and translation direction (german-english and english-german). the rest of the paper is structured as follows. section 2 provides a more in-depth analysis of the relations between readability and translational tendencies, especially simplification. in section 3, we explain the rationale behind the proposed methodology and describe the setup of the two experiments. subsection 3.1 contains the details on the textual data used to train and evaluate the models, and the testing data to for zero-shot transfer to translations and simultaneous interpreting. subsection 3.2 offers a description of the modelling process and the measure used to estimate the readability of mediated segments. the results of the experiments are detailed and interpreted in section 4. we conclude with section 5, which summarises the study and highlights the findings. ## cross-lingual mediation and readability in the context of this research, the specificity of cross-lingual mediation as a type of communicative activity can be viewed as dominated by two opposite trends. on the one hand, mediated lan-guage is expected to feature increased readability as an integral effect of simplification, explicitation and standardisation. on the other hand, translated and interpreted segments are likely to exhibit traits of interference from the source language, which might make them more difficult to read. below, we give a brief overview of tendencies in translational behaviour that can be linked to readability. one of the most discussed trends in both translators' and interpreters' behaviour is simplification. it can be described as "a subconscious tendency to simplify the language or message or both of the source" @xcite . evidence for various types of simplification in translation was reported in a number of corpus-based and computational studies, especially earlier ones @xcite , to name just a few). readability scores are used as an indicator of simplification on the assumption that easier-toread texts must be less complex @xcite @xcite . importantly, most simplification-supporting evidence comes from lexical features, such as those used by @xcite : ttr, mean word length, syllable ratio, lexical density, mean word rank, and mean sentence length. for example, @xcite reported some evidence in favour of a number of translationese trends, especially simplification, in translated english. however, if simplification is operationalised at the syntactic level, as in @xcite , who looked at news articles in seven languages translated into chinese, simplification hypothesis does not hold. @xcite also disproved simplification: sentences in englishto-russian translations of mass-media texts had a strong tendency to be longer and more complex than in comparable non-translations. other tendencies that can be viewed as contributing to increased readability of mediated output are normalisation and levelling-out. they describe the trend in translation to prefer linguistic expressions that constitute prototypical features of the target language, which might lead to exaggerating these features (over-normalisation) and make translations more similar to each other than originals in either source or target language @xcite . the empirical support for this claim also varies depending on the language pair. for example, @xcite did not find evidence for normalisation in translated chinese, while the research on translated russian suggests ample evidence that translators actually over-emphasise some of the features of the target language @xcite . @xcite demonstrated that the relative contribution of normalisation depended on the distance between the source and target languages. translations from structurally-similar languages were found to demonstrate greater conformity to the tl norms and were more predictable, while translations from structurally-divergent source languages contained more non-idiomatic features making them more entropic and unusual in terms of lexical density, mean sentence length, frequencies of conjunctions and passives, etc. finally, the tendency to make translations more explicit is usually linked to the potential readability gains. explicitation is described as a trend of the target texts to spell out components that are implicit on the linguistic surface of the source text. the most studied explicitation phenomenon is the increased explicitness of cohesion in translations manifested by a greater number of connectives. other explicitation phenomena include additional explanatory phrases and deciphered implicatures. although the findings from the translationese studies are mixed, it is not uncommon to conclude that "compared to original texts, translations tend to be simpler, more standardised, and more explicit" @xcite . from the readability perspective, a translationese trend that might work against increasing fluency of the text, is shining-through @xcite or interference. this term is used to refer to a tendency in translation to follow the source language patterns where possible. interference drives up the frequencies of the linguistic features shared by the source and target languages and results in unusual awkward wordings. similarly, the potential effects of mediation (at least in the written mode) sometimes include sentence lengthening @xcite . @xcite found that the mean sentence length in english translated from a number of languages (based on europarl data) is higher than in comparable english originals, which contradicts the simplification hypothesis. investigations into simultaneous interpreting often compare the results to written translation. the findings usually align with @xcite , who concluded that interpreting is associated with a strong simplification effect. for example, @xcite estab-lished reduced lexical variation in english-polish interpreting based on europarl speeches. @xcite , using transcripts of speeches in the united nations confirmed simplification (measured by lexical variety and density) for interpreting into english, but not into russian. @xcite found that there were fewer nouns and more pronouns in interpreted german than in comparable originals and translations, which was explained by the similarity of interpreting and unplanned spoken conversation. to sum up, previous feature-based research on the properties of mediated language makes it difficult to judge about its comparative complexity/readability, mostly because of the atomistic nature of the features, pointing in opposite directions. besides, the translational tendencies described above may overlap in terms of their operationalisation and interpretation with regard to readability. on the one hand, explicitation aims to make the text more accessible to the target audience and on the other hand, it increases the sentence length, and well-established readability formulae such as flesh-kincaid reading ease treat longer sentences as more difficult to read. nonetheless, the previous research indicated that there might be good reasons to expect professional cross-lingual mediation, especially in interpreting, to increase text readability. the motivation behind this study is to leverage the power of modern language models and estimate the readability of translated and interpreted texts in a holistic manner, refraining from designing features and detecting specific trends. translation scholars convincingly hypothesise that clarification of the original communicative intent and disambiguation of the original message are integral parts of cross-lingual mediation, which should improve the comprehensibility of mediated texts for the target audience. if the effects of simplification, explicitation and normalisation were not counteracted by shining-through, it is not unreasonable to suggest that mediated subcorpora should have higher readability scores than non-mediated subcorpora in the source or target language. this claim is stronger for high-quality professional translation/interpreting (used in this study) because professional translators and interpreters (unlike amateurs or students) can be expected to effectively counteract interference and follow the best practices disseminated and established through professional training (redel-inghuys, 2016). ## methodology our methodology is based on fine-tuning a multilingual neural model on english readability-annotated data and applying the resulting models to english-german translational data in a zero-shot transfer scenario. this approach is inspired by @xcite who reported remarkably strong zero-short performance for large multilingual models, fine-tuned on english and evaluated on crosslingual inference and classification tasks. the assumed reliability of zero-shot transfer helps us circumvent the lack of readability data in german. ## results and discussion the results are reported by experiment, starting with the evaluation study on newsela and then, focusing on the outcomes of the zero-shot transfer to translated/interpreted data. ## conclusion this project adopts a modelling-driven approach to the study of readability/complexity of translated and interpreted texts against their sources and comparable originals in the target language. it is designed to test a theoretical claim, often made in translation studies and supported by some empirical evidence, that professional translation, and especially interpreting, entails a considerable simplification effect. in this study, the properties of translations and interpreting are contrasted with the sources (based on parallel segment-aligned data) and with comparable originals in the target language. our method consists in fine-tuning a pretrained multilingual model in a number of settings (required to respect the specificity of the two types of comparisons -targets to sources and targets to originals) and applying the fine-tuned models to texts produced in various cross-lingual mediation conditions in a zero-shot transfer scenario. we use the annotations in the newsela readability corpus to create computational models of linguistic complexity and then transfer them to the bidirectional english-german translational data from europarl reporting the results for spoken and written mediation mode in each translation direction separately. our findings from several experimental setups reveal a certain pattern of readability/simplification effects in cross-lingual mediation. when compared to their sources, targets tend to be easier to read, especially in interpreting and in german-to-english direction. written translation into german might be an exception to this trend: german written targets were more often predicted as more complex than their sources. when compared to the originals in the target language, targets are simpler in interpreting, but not in translation. written translations were found more difficult to read than originallyauthored tests in the same language, possibly with some exceptions for english, where the difference between the categories was small. it is important to bare in mind that the nature and strength of any translationese effects are registerand language-pair-dependent. the claims made in this study are only applicable to the specific register and domain of the underlying translational data. we plan to extend this study to spanish newsela data and spanish segment of europarl to explore the properties of zero-shot predictions. also, we leave the qualitative analysis of simplification transformations in the newsela simplification versions and in translation data as well as the analysis of the models' training process for future work.