Found in Translation: Reconstructing Phylogenetic Language Trees from Translations

Ella Rabinovich, Noam Ordan, Shuly Wintner


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.
Anthology ID:
P17-1049
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
530–540
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1049
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1049
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ella Rabinovich, Noam Ordan, and Shuly Wintner. 2017. Found in Translation: Reconstructing Phylogenetic Language Trees from Translations. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 530–540, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Found in Translation: Reconstructing Phylogenetic Language Trees from Translations (Rabinovich et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1049.pdf
Presentation:
 P17-1049.Presentation.pdf