On the differences between human translations

Abstract

Many studies have confirmed that translated texts exhibit different features than texts originally written in the given language. This work explores texts translated by different translators taking into account expertise and native language. A set of computational analyses was conducted on three language pairs, English-Croatian, German-French and English-Finnish, and the results show that each of the factors has certain influence on the features of the translated texts, especially on sentence length and lexical richness. The results also indicate that for translations used for machine translation evaluation, it is important to specify these factors, especially if comparing machine translation quality with human translation quality is involved.

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