While it is has often been observed that the product of translation is somehow different than non-translated text, scholars have emphasized 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 language. 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 genres, 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.
REF study the impact of the distance between languages on the translation product and conclude that it is directly correlated with the ability to distinguish translations from a given source language from non-translated text.
Translationese and Its Dialects
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Computer Science