Abstract
This paper explores the readability of translated and interpreted texts compared to the original source texts and target language texts in the same domain. It was shown in the literature that translated and interpreted texts could exhibit lexical and syntactic properties that make them simpler, and hence, easier to process than their sources or comparable non-translations. In translation, this effect is attributed to the tendency to simplify and disambiguate the message. In interpreting, it can be enhanced by the temporal and cognitive constraints. We use readability annotations from the Newsela corpus to formulate a number of classification and regression tasks and fine-tune a multilingual pre-trained model on these tasks, obtaining models that can differentiate between complex and simple sentences. Then, the models are applied to predict the readability of sources, targets, and comparable target language originals in a zero-shot manner. Our test data – parallel and comparable – come from English-German bidirectional interpreting and translation subsets from the Europarl corpus. The results confirm the difference in readability between translated/interpreted targets against sentences in standard originally-authored source and target languages. Besides, we find consistent differences between the translation directions in the English-German language pair.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.tsar-1.4
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Varna, Bulgaria
- Editors:
- Sanja Štajner, Horacio Saggio, Matthew Shardlow, Fernando Alva-Manchego
- Venues:
- TSAR | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
- Note:
- Pages:
- 33–43
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.tsar-1.4
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Maria Kunilovskaya, Ruslan Mitkov, and Eveline Wandl-Vogt. 2023. Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability Effects. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability, pages 33–43, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
- Cite (Informal):
- Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability Effects (Kunilovskaya et al., TSAR-WS 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.tsar-1.4.pdf