Glossary · ESL writing & AI detection

Translationese

Translationese is the statistical and stylistic fingerprint that translated text carries: word-for-word calques, over-explicit phrasing, and a flatter, more uniform rhythm than text composed directly in the target language. Drafts that second-language writers translate from their first language — in their head or through machine translation — carry the same fingerprint.

Translation scholars have documented for decades that translated text differs measurably from text originally composed in the target language — consistently enough that trained classifiers can tell the two apart. The recurring traits: explicitation (translations spell out what originals leave implicit), safer and more uniform word choices, source-language interference in word order and collocation, and a flattened rhythm in which sentences settle into similar lengths and shapes.

Second-language writers produce translationese with no translator in the room. Compose a paragraph in your first language — on paper or silently — and render it into English sentence by sentence, and the output inherits the source language's skeleton: its word order surfaces as translation ghosts, its idioms as calques, and the phrasing runs over-explicit because you translate everything instead of trusting English shorthand. Running a full draft through machine translation produces the same fingerprint, only more uniformly.

The fix is structural, not lexical. Swapping individual words leaves the fingerprint intact, because it lives in sentence architecture; the draft has to be rebuilt around English information flow. Diglot's Sounds-Translated checker is built to spot exactly this fingerprint, and because translationese from many source languages leans on impersonal and passive constructions, the passive-voice detector catches a second layer of it. The goal is not to hide that you think in two languages — it is to make the English read as English.

Related terms

Translation ghost — A translation ghost is a sentence that is grammatically correct English but whose word order and emphasis still follow the writer's first language — the source language shows through like a ghost image.
Calque — A calque is a phrase translated word-for-word from another language into English, such as "make a photo" instead of "take a photo." Every word is correct on its own; the combination is borrowed from the writer's first language..
Runglish — Runglish is the informal name for Russian-influenced English: dropped articles (Russian has none), word-for-word calques like "make a photo," and false friends such as магазин (a shop) shadowing magazine.

Diglot is a bilingual writing editor built for the writers these terms describe — start for free, no credit card required.