# Translationese as a Rational Response to Translation Task Difficulty

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12050 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12050/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Word Alignment by Fine-tuning Embeddings on Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08231/) (2021)
- [Why Does Surprisal From Larger Transformer-Based Language Models Provide a Poorer Fit to Human Reading Times?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12131/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Predictions of People Perusing: Evaluating Metrics of Language Model Performance for Psycholinguistic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03954/) (2020)
- [Comparing Feature-Engineering and Feature-Learning Approaches for Multilingual Translationese Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07604/) (2021)
- [Measuring Spurious Correlation in Classification: 'Clever Hans' in Translationese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13170/) (2023)
- [EPIC-EuroParl-UdS: Information-Theoretic Perspectives on Translation and Interpreting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09785/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Translated texts exhibit systematic differences from comparable texts originally written in the target language. Explaining this phenomenon, commonly known as translationese, remains an open challenge. Translationese has been attributed to production tendencies (e.g. interference, simplification), socio-cultural variables, and language-pair effects, yet a unified explanatory account is lacking. We investigate the hypothesis that translationese is a response to the cognitive load inherent in the translation task. We test whether observable translationese can be predicted from quantifiable measures of translation task difficulty. Translationese is measured as a segment-level probability of being a translation produced by an automatic classifier (translatedness score). Translation task difficulty includes source-text and cross-lingual transfer components. They are captured by information-theoretic metrics based on LLM surprisal and by established syntactic and semantic alternatives. We use a bidirectional English-German corpus comprising written and spoken subcorpora. Results indicate that translationese can only be explained in part by translation task difficulty, especially in the English-to-German direction. For most experiments, cross-lingual transfer difficulty contributes more than source-text complexity. Information-theoretic indicators match or outperform traditional features in written mode, but offer no advantage in spoken mode. Source-text syntactic complexity and translation-solution entropy emerged as the strongest predictors of translationese across language pairs and modes.