Effect of translationese on machine translation quality
"Translationese" refers to the unique structural characteristics of translated text compared to text originally written in a given language, a result of compromises made by translators between fidelity and fluency in source and target languages. We examine the effect of translationese on machine translation in three contexts a phrase based statistical system, a neural model, and an unsupervised phrase based system in translations from a variety of languages to English. We find that regardless of language and system, models trained on target corpora translated from the source language outperform models trained on original target language corpora, with especially strong improvements in the case of a low resource language.