Translating away Translationese without Parallel Data
Rricha Jalota Koel Dutta Chowdhury Cristina España-Bonet Josef van Genabith
Translated texts exhibit systematic linguistic differences compared to
original texts in the same language, and these differences are referred to as
translationese. Translationese has effects on various cross-lingual natural
language processing tasks, potentially leading to biased results. In this
paper, we explore a novel approach to reduce translationese in translated
texts: translation-based style transfer. As there are no parallel
human-translated and original data in the same language, we use a
self-supervised approach that can learn from comparable (rather than parallel)
mono-lingual original and translated data. However, even this self-supervised
approach requires some parallel data for validation. We show how we can
eliminate the need for parallel validation data by combining the
self-supervised loss with an unsupervised loss. This unsupervised loss
leverages the original language model loss over the style-transferred output
and a semantic similarity loss between the input and style-transferred output.
We evaluate our approach in terms of original vs. translationese binary
classification in addition to measuring content preservation and target-style
fluency. The results show that our approach is able to reduce translationese
classifier accuracy to a level of a random classifier after style transfer
while adequately preserving the content and fluency in the target original
style.