The Effect of Translation on Text Coherence: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Investigating the coherence of translated texts is an important issue in multilingual studies. In this paper, we aim to study text coherence in human translated texts and its relation to the text properties by a quantitative approach. For this purpose, we assigned a word importance value to each word-type of a text and construct the text ‘importance time series’ from the original and translated texts. Then, we calculated text global coherence by applying Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) to these time series. By means of this procedure, we were able to compare the coherence of the original and translated texts. Our results show that a translation does not always decrease text coherence, as many people may suppose; there are many cases where text coherence is increased by translation. We also studied the relation of text coherence and the text properties such as text size or vocabulary size; we observed no relevance. Our findings suggest that the coherence of a text depends on the translator’s abilities rather than the state of being original or translated.