On the differences between human translations

Maja Popovic


Abstract
Many studies have confirmed that translated texts exhibit different features than texts originally written in the given language. This work explores texts translated by different translators taking into account expertise and native language. A set of computational analyses was conducted on three language pairs, English-Croatian, German-French and English-Finnish, and the results show that each of the factors has certain influence on the features of the translated texts, especially on sentence length and lexical richness. The results also indicate that for translations used for machine translation evaluation, it is important to specify these factors, especially if comparing machine translation quality with human translation quality is involved.
Anthology ID:
2020.eamt-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Lisboa, Portugal
Editors:
André Martins, Helena Moniz, Sara Fumega, Bruno Martins, Fernando Batista, Luisa Coheur, Carla Parra, Isabel Trancoso, Marco Turchi, Arianna Bisazza, Joss Moorkens, Ana Guerberof, Mary Nurminen, Lena Marg, Mikel L. Forcada
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
365–374
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.39
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maja Popovic. 2020. On the differences between human translations. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 365–374, Lisboa, Portugal. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
On the differences between human translations (Popovic, EAMT 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.39.pdf