@inproceedings{rapacz-smywinski-pohl-2026-degree-zero,
title = "Degree Zero of Translation: Using Interlinear Baselines to Quantify Translator Intervention",
author = "Rapacz, Maciej and
Smywi{\'n}ski-Pohl, Aleksander",
editor = "Alves, Diego and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania and
Kazantseva, Anna and
Pagel, Janis and
Szpakowicz, Stan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th Joint {SIGHUM} Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.22/",
pages = "227--240",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-373-9",
abstract = "Literary translation is rarely a neutral act of linguistic transfer, but rather a continuous series of conscious interventions - restructuring, semantic shifts, and stylistic adaptations. While Translation Studies analyzes these shifts qualitatively, current computational methods focus primarily on quality evaluation (e.g., BLEU, COMET) or authorship attribution (e.g., stylometry), lacking a scalable metric to quantify the extent and character of the translator{'}s intervention. We propose a novel method to measure the translator{'}s signal by using Interlinear Translation - a strict word-for-word gloss - as a computational baseline representing translational ``Degree Zero,'' i.e., a neutral form of source text devoid of any stylistic adaptation.We define the Intervention Vector as the semantic difference between a literary translation and its interlinear counterpart in a high-dimensional vector space. We validate this approach on a multilingual corpus of the Greek New Testament translations comprising 5 interlinear baselines and 74 literary translations across 5 languages: English (16), French (14), Italian (12), Polish (16), and Spanish (16).Our results demonstrate that the magnitude of the Intervention Vector effectively ranks texts along a spectrum from literal to paraphrase, aligning with established theoretical categories. We find that this magnitude consistently distinguishes between translation strategies, yielding significantly longer vectors for dynamic and paraphrase strategies compared to literal and formal ones. This framework provides a quantitative method for analyzing translator agency without the need for a comprehensive corpus of reference translations."
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<abstract>Literary translation is rarely a neutral act of linguistic transfer, but rather a continuous series of conscious interventions - restructuring, semantic shifts, and stylistic adaptations. While Translation Studies analyzes these shifts qualitatively, current computational methods focus primarily on quality evaluation (e.g., BLEU, COMET) or authorship attribution (e.g., stylometry), lacking a scalable metric to quantify the extent and character of the translator’s intervention. We propose a novel method to measure the translator’s signal by using Interlinear Translation - a strict word-for-word gloss - as a computational baseline representing translational “Degree Zero,” i.e., a neutral form of source text devoid of any stylistic adaptation.We define the Intervention Vector as the semantic difference between a literary translation and its interlinear counterpart in a high-dimensional vector space. We validate this approach on a multilingual corpus of the Greek New Testament translations comprising 5 interlinear baselines and 74 literary translations across 5 languages: English (16), French (14), Italian (12), Polish (16), and Spanish (16).Our results demonstrate that the magnitude of the Intervention Vector effectively ranks texts along a spectrum from literal to paraphrase, aligning with established theoretical categories. We find that this magnitude consistently distinguishes between translation strategies, yielding significantly longer vectors for dynamic and paraphrase strategies compared to literal and formal ones. This framework provides a quantitative method for analyzing translator agency without the need for a comprehensive corpus of reference translations.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Degree Zero of Translation: Using Interlinear Baselines to Quantify Translator Intervention
%A Rapacz, Maciej
%A Smywiński-Pohl, Aleksander
%Y Alves, Diego
%Y Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania
%Y Kazantseva, Anna
%Y Pagel, Janis
%Y Szpakowicz, Stan
%S Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026
%D 2026
%8 March
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Rabat, Morocco
%@ 979-8-89176-373-9
%F rapacz-smywinski-pohl-2026-degree-zero
%X Literary translation is rarely a neutral act of linguistic transfer, but rather a continuous series of conscious interventions - restructuring, semantic shifts, and stylistic adaptations. While Translation Studies analyzes these shifts qualitatively, current computational methods focus primarily on quality evaluation (e.g., BLEU, COMET) or authorship attribution (e.g., stylometry), lacking a scalable metric to quantify the extent and character of the translator’s intervention. We propose a novel method to measure the translator’s signal by using Interlinear Translation - a strict word-for-word gloss - as a computational baseline representing translational “Degree Zero,” i.e., a neutral form of source text devoid of any stylistic adaptation.We define the Intervention Vector as the semantic difference between a literary translation and its interlinear counterpart in a high-dimensional vector space. We validate this approach on a multilingual corpus of the Greek New Testament translations comprising 5 interlinear baselines and 74 literary translations across 5 languages: English (16), French (14), Italian (12), Polish (16), and Spanish (16).Our results demonstrate that the magnitude of the Intervention Vector effectively ranks texts along a spectrum from literal to paraphrase, aligning with established theoretical categories. We find that this magnitude consistently distinguishes between translation strategies, yielding significantly longer vectors for dynamic and paraphrase strategies compared to literal and formal ones. This framework provides a quantitative method for analyzing translator agency without the need for a comprehensive corpus of reference translations.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.22/
%P 227-240
Markdown (Informal)
[Degree Zero of Translation: Using Interlinear Baselines to Quantify Translator Intervention](https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.22/) (Rapacz & Smywiński-Pohl, LaTeCH-CLfL 2026)
ACL