Comparative method for quantitative assessment of the quality of translations

The modern era of globalisation has led to the expansion of scientific and cultural ties between countries and has aroused interest in the problem of quality translation. For everyday use, there are now many translation programs, for example, Yandex Translate or Google Translate. When watching movies, people also most often choose a dubbed translation. Moreover, in messengers, messages can be automatically translated into the desired language to overcome the language barrier. The transition of translation to the digital dimension affects the quality of the translated text and its perception by a person. Therefore, in the first decades of the current century, the problem of quantifying translation from one language to another becomes very relevant and attractive to researchers. Our method is based on A. Kolmogorov's concept of the sources of textual variability: 1) information content, 2) form, 3) unconscious author's style. Obviously, the task of preserving the first two sources when translating a text is quite simple for professionals. Any bilingual reader can easily verify that. However, the third source - the unconscious “author's” style - determines the quality of the translation, because the translator's influence on the author's style. In this regard, literary critics need accurate non-subjective methods to determine how adequately the author's style is reproduced. In this work, we use a method based on data compression, which makes it possible to quantify the quality of translation of texts by different translators. The study was carried out on the texts of translations of classical English-language works of fiction into Russian and, conversely, Russian fiction into English. Our method is intended for comparative analysis of different translations of the same text. As a result of the study, we received an unexpected discovery. Translations from English into Russian preserve the style of the author much better than translations from Russian into English. We think this result is an additional demonstration of the power of information theory.