@InProceedings{rabinovich-ordan-wintner:2017:Long,
  author    = {Rabinovich, Ella  and  Ordan, Noam  and  Wintner, Shuly},
  title     = {Found in Translation: Reconstructing Phylogenetic Language Trees from Translations},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month     = {July},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Vancouver, Canada},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {530--540},
  abstract  = {Translation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and
	literature for thousands of years. Translators have always tried to be
	invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in
	the target language. We show that traces of the source language remain in the
	translation product to the extent that it is possible to uncover the history of
	the source language by looking only at the translation. Specifically, we
	automatically reconstruct phylogenetic language trees from monolingual texts
	(translated from several source languages). The signal of the source language
	is so powerful that it is retained even after two phases of translation. This
	strongly indicates that source language interference is the most dominant
	characteristic of translated texts, overshadowing the more subtle signals of
	universal properties of translation.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/P17-1049}
}