TY - GEN
T1 - Found in translation
T2 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017
AU - Rabinovich, Ella
AU - Ordan, Noam
AU - Wintner, Shuly
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85040913743
U2 - 10.18653/v1/P17-1049
DO - 10.18653/v1/P17-1049
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - ACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
SP - 530
EP - 540
BT - ACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Y2 - 30 July 2017 through 4 August 2017
ER -