Original or Translated? A Causal Analysis of the Impact of Translationese on Machine Translation Performance. (arXiv:2205.02293v1 [cs.CL])

Human-translated text displays distinct features from naturally written text
in the same language. This phenomena, known as translationese, has been argued
to confound the machine translation (MT) evaluation. Yet, we find that existing
work on translationese neglects some important factors and the conclusions are
mostly correlational but not causal. In this work, we collect CausalMT, a
dataset where the MT training data are also labeled with the human translation
directions. We inspect two critical factors, the train-test direction match
(whether …

analysis arxiv impact machine machine translation performance translation