How Human is Machine Translationese? Comparing Human and Machine Translations of Text and Speech
Open accessAbstract
Translationese is a phenomenon present in human translations, simultaneous interpreting, and even machine translations.Some translationese features tend to appear in simultaneous interpreting with higher frequency than in human text translation, but the reasons for this are unclear.This study analyzes translationese patterns in translation, interpreting, and machine translation outputs in order to explore possible reasons.In our analysis we (i) detail two non-invasive ways of detecting translationese and (ii) compare translationese across human and machine translations from text and speech.We find that machine translation shows traces of translationese, but does not reproduce the patterns found in human translation, offering support to the hypothesis that such patterns are due to the model (human vs. machine) rather than to the data (written vs. spoken).
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Machine-translated data can cause translationese or possible name bias, gender bias, or cultural bias.
“We try to avoid using machine-translated data to finetune the model in order to prevent translationese (Bizzoni et al., 2020; Muennighoff et al., 2023) or possible name bias (Wang et al., 2022a), gender bias (Savoldi et al., 2021), or cultural bias (Ji et al., 2023).”
From The Llama 3 Herd of Models (2024) · cites this paper as Bizzoni et al., 2020
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“Among these studies, Bizzoni et al. (2020) find that MT shows independent patterns of transla-tionese and it resembles HT only partly.”
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- Authors
- Bizzoni, Y., Juzek, T. S., España-Bonet, C., Dutta Chowdhury, K., van Genabith, J., & Teich, E.
- Affiliations
- Saarland University (DE)
- German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DE)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
- Published
- 2020
- Pages
- 280-290
- OpenAlex
- W3037278729
- Cited by
- 34
- References
- 40
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 4 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 24.90
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 1102)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Translation Studies and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity
- Keywords
- translationese, machine translation, human translation, simultaneous interpreting, speech translation
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