{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-effect-of-translationese-in-machine","title":"The Effect of Translationese in Machine Translation Test Sets","arxiv_id":"1906.08069","date":"2019-06-19","proceeding":"WS 2019 8","authors":["Mike Zhang","Antonio Toral"],"abstract":"The effect of translationese has been studied in the field of machine translation (MT), mostly with respect to training data. We study in depth the effect of translationese on test data, using the test sets from the last three editions of WMT's news shared task, containing 17 translation directions. We show evidence that (i) the use of translationese in test sets results in inflated human evaluation scores for MT systems; (ii) in some cases system rankings do change and (iii) the impact translationese has on a translation direction is inversely correlated to the translation quality attainable by state-of-the-art MT systems for that direction.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08069v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08069v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-effect-of-translationese-in-machine","repo_url":"https://github.com/jjzha/translationese","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1906.08069","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1906.08069"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/jjzha/translationese","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"e11558180e46555a","entry":"related","repo":"jjzha/translationese","repo_kind":"official","path":"relatedness.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jjzha/translationese/blob/HEAD/relatedness.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e11558180e46555a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}