ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Phys.
Sec. Social Physics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphy.2025.1596816
This article is part of the Research TopicIntegrating Trans-disciplinary Methods between Physics and LinguisticsView all 3 articles
Combination of ranking method and time reversal asymmetry for evaluating the quality of translations: A case study on passages from Edgar Allan Poe and Kenzaburo Oe
Provisionally accepted
- Sapporo Gakuin University, Ebetsu, Japan
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Complex systems approach to natural language has become a fascinating topic closely related to both physics and linguistics. In this paper, to assess the quality of translations of English literary passages into Japanese, a comparative study is conducted on several translations. First, translated writings are expressed with 45 syllabics, and subsequently the ranking of their frequencies is analyzed statistically with the combined use of a nonlinear regression and the Durbin-Watson ratio that allows one to detect the serial correlation in a sequence. To examine correlations of syllabic sequences, regressions are made on both a long-tailed and a short-tailed function. The validity of our method for revealing correlations in the Markovian sequences of Japanese syllabics is confirmed by comparing results of two original examples: popularity ranking of boy names, and passages from a Japanese novel. Subsequently the method is applied, for the first time to our knowledge, to fourteen translations of passages from Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), and five backtranslations of those from Kenzaburo Oe , a Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1994. A diachronic analysis of computed results for the latter translations by three humans and two artificial intelligences shows that while the quality of the translation by Google Translate (as of April 2020) falls far short of a human translator next in rank, the updated one (as of October 2024) is comparable to the top, but it might appear still too soon to speculate on its unconditional potentiality. Both our methodology and results are not only novel but are expected to make a contribution toward an interdisciplinary study between physics and linguistics.
Keywords: Statistical linguistics, mathematical stylistics, long-tailed syllabic distribution, Durbin-Watson ratio, backtranslation experiment, artificial intelligence
Received: 20 Mar 2025; Accepted: 24 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hayata. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kazuya Hayata, Sapporo Gakuin University, Ebetsu, Japan
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