A Parallel Corpus of Translationese

TL;DR

This paper introduces bilingual English--French and English--German parallel corpora with annotated translation directions, supporting research on translationese identification and its applications in human and machine translation.

Contribution

It provides diverse, annotated corpora for translationese research, validated through replication and extension of previous identification experiments.

Findings

Successful replication of translationese identification results

Extended experiments to additional datasets and languages

Validated quality and reliability of the corpora

Abstract

We describe a set of bilingual English--French and English--German parallel corpora in which the direction of translation is accurately and reliably annotated. The corpora are diverse, consisting of parliamentary proceedings, literary works, transcriptions of TED talks and political commentary. They will be instrumental for research of translationese and its applications to (human and machine) translation; specifically, they can be used for the task of translationese identification, a research direction that enjoys a growing interest in recent years. To validate the quality and reliability of the corpora, we replicated previous results of supervised and unsupervised identification of translationese, and further extended the experiments to additional datasets and languages.