Investigating the Impact of Different Pivot Languages on Translation Quality

Abstract

Translating via an intermediate pivot language is a common practice, but the impact of the pivot language on the quality of the final translation has not often been investigated. In order to compare the effect of different pivots, we back-translate 41 English source segments via vari- ous intermediate channels (Arabic, Chinese and monolingual paraphrasing) into English. We compare the 912 English back-translations of the 41 original English segments using manual evaluation, as well as COMET and various incarnations of BLEU. We compare human from- scratch back-translations with MT back-translations and monolingual paraphrasing. A varia- tion of BLEU (Cum-2) seems to better correlate with our manual evaluation than COMET and the conventional BLEU Cum-4, but a fine-grained qualitative analysis reveals that differences between different pivot languages (Arabic and Chinese) are not captured by the automatized TQA measures.

Tasks

Reproductions