Decoding machine translationese in English-Chinese news : LLMs vs. NMTs

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Kong, D, & Macken, L.
Editor
Pierrette Bouillon, Johanna Gerlach, Sabrina Girletti, Lise Volkart, Raphael Rubino, Rico Sennrich, Ana C. Farinha, Marco Gaido, Joke Daems, Dorothy Kenny, Helena Moniz and Sara Szoc
Series
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX : volume 1
Pagination
99-112
Publisher
European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
Conference
20th Machine Translation Summit (Geneva, Switzerland)
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Abstract

This study explores Machine Translationese (MTese) — the linguistic peculiarities of machine translation outputs — focusing on the under-researched English-to-Chinese language pair in news texts. We construct a large dataset consisting of 4 sub-corpora and employ a comprehensive five-layer feature set. Then, a chi-square ranking algorithm is applied for feature selection in both classification and clustering tasks. Our findings confirm the presence of MTese in both Neural Machine Translation systems (NMTs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). Original Chinese texts are nearly perfectly distinguishable from both LLM and NMT outputs. Notable linguistic patterns in MT outputs are shorter sentence lengths and increased use of adversative conjunctions. Comparing LLMs and NMTs, we achieve approximately 70% classification accuracy, with LLMs exhibiting greater lexical diversity and NMTs using more brackets. Additionally, translation-specific LLMs show lower lexical diversity but higher usage of causal conjunctions compared to generic LLMs. Lastly, we find no significant differences between LLMs developed by Chinese firms and their foreign counterparts.