Machine vs. Human: Exploring Syntax and Lexicon in German Translations, with a Spotlight on Anglicisms

Anastassia Shaitarova, Anne Göhring, Martin Volk

Keywords: machine translation, corpus-linguistic, anglicisms, German, language change

TL;DR: The paper provides a detailed comparative analysis of German texts produced by human translators and commercial engines.

Abstract: Machine Translation (MT) has become an integral part of daily life for millions of people, with its output being so fluent that users often cannot distinguish it from human translation. However, these fluid texts often harbor algorithmic traces, from limited lexical choices to societal misrepresentations. This raises concerns about the possible effects of MT on natural language and human communication and calls for regular evaluations of machine-generated translations for different languages. Our paper explores the output of three widely used engines (Google, DeepL, Microsoft Azure) and one smaller commercial system. We translate the English and French source texts of seven diverse parallel corpora into German and compare MT-produced texts to human references in terms of lexical, syntactic, and morphological features. Additionally, we investigate how MT leverages lexical borrowings and analyse the distribution of anglicisms across the German translations.

Student Paper: Yes, the first author is a student