Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty
Maria Kunilovskaya

TL;DR
This paper investigates how translationese, the divergence in translated texts, can be explained as a response to the cognitive load of translation tasks, using information-theoretic measures and linguistic features.
Contribution
It introduces a novel explanation that translationese results from translation task difficulty and demonstrates this with quantifiable measures and a bilingual corpus analysis.
Findings
Translationese can be partly predicted by task difficulty measures.
Cross-lingual transfer difficulty impacts translationese more than source-text complexity.
Information-theoretic metrics outperform traditional features in written translation modes.
Abstract
Translations systematically diverge from texts originally produced in the target language, a phenomenon widely referred to as translationese. Translationese has been attributed to production tendencies (e.g. interference, simplification), socio-cultural variables, and language-pair effects, yet a unified explanatory account is still lacking. We propose that translationese reflects cognitive load inherent in the translation task itself. We test whether observable translationese can be predicted from quantifiable measures of translation task difficulty. Translationese is operationalised as a segment-level translatedness score produced by an automatic classifier. Translation task difficulty is conceptualised as comprising source-text and cross-lingual transfer components, operationalised mainly through information-theoretic metrics based on LLM surprisal, complemented by established…
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Taxonomy
TopicsTranslation Studies and Practices · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Text Readability and Simplification
