<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="kunilovskaya-2026-translationese">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Kunilovskaya</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Barry</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Haddow</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Tom</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Kocmi</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Philipp</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Koehn</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Christof</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Monz</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-474-3</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Translated texts exhibit systematic differences from comparable texts originally written in the target language. Explaining this phenomenon, commonly known as translationese, remains an open challenge. Translationese has been attributed to production tendencies (e.g. interference, simplification), socio-cultural variables, and language-pair effects, yet a unified explanatory account is lacking. We investigate the hypothesis that translationese is a response to the cognitive load inherent in the translation task. We test whether observable translationese can be predicted from quantifiable measures of translation task difficulty. Translationese is measured as a segment-level probability of being a translation produced by an automatic classifier (translatedness score). Translation task difficulty includes source-text and cross-lingual transfer components. They are captured by information-theoretic metrics based on LLM surprisal and by established syntactic and semantic alternatives. We use a bidirectional English-German corpus comprising written and spoken subcorpora. Results indicate that translationese can only be explained in part by translation task difficulty, especially in the English-to-German direction. For most experiments, cross-lingual transfer difficulty contributes more than source-text complexity. Information-theoretic indicators match or outperform traditional features in written mode, but offer no advantage in spoken mode. Source-text syntactic complexity and translation-solution entropy emerged as the strongest predictors of translationese across language pairs and modes.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">kunilovskaya-2026-translationese</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.22/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-10</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>380</start>
            <end>397</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty
%A Kunilovskaya, Maria
%Y Haddow, Barry
%Y Kocmi, Tom
%Y Koehn, Philipp
%Y Monz, Christof
%S Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-474-3
%F kunilovskaya-2026-translationese
%X Translated texts exhibit systematic differences from comparable texts originally written in the target language. Explaining this phenomenon, commonly known as translationese, remains an open challenge. Translationese has been attributed to production tendencies (e.g. interference, simplification), socio-cultural variables, and language-pair effects, yet a unified explanatory account is lacking. We investigate the hypothesis that translationese is a response to the cognitive load inherent in the translation task. We test whether observable translationese can be predicted from quantifiable measures of translation task difficulty. Translationese is measured as a segment-level probability of being a translation produced by an automatic classifier (translatedness score). Translation task difficulty includes source-text and cross-lingual transfer components. They are captured by information-theoretic metrics based on LLM surprisal and by established syntactic and semantic alternatives. We use a bidirectional English-German corpus comprising written and spoken subcorpora. Results indicate that translationese can only be explained in part by translation task difficulty, especially in the English-to-German direction. For most experiments, cross-lingual transfer difficulty contributes more than source-text complexity. Information-theoretic indicators match or outperform traditional features in written mode, but offer no advantage in spoken mode. Source-text syntactic complexity and translation-solution entropy emerged as the strongest predictors of translationese across language pairs and modes.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.22/
%P 380-397

Markdown (Informal)

[Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty](https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.22/) (Kunilovskaya, WMT 2026)

• Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty (Kunilovskaya, WMT 2026)

ACL

• Maria Kunilovskaya. 2026. Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 380–397, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.