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Linguistic and Demographic Factors in an Online Free Translation Task

Humans are remarkably adept of understanding unfamiliar languages, in part by utilizing resources from languages they do know. In this study, we investigated how various linguistic factors (word order, lexical distance) and demographic factors affected the speed and correctness of translations in a multilingual scenario. In free translation task conducted online, participants read Polish noun phrases and translated them into English text. The noun phrases were varied between noun-adjective and adjective-noun word order, and the number of international words varied among the stimuli. Both the accuracy and total response time were recorded, and additional demographic data was recorded for all participants. Participants were more successful at translating noun phrases composed of two international terms than those with one or no such words. Additionally, speakers of other Slavic languages were more accurate despite not knowing Polish than participants who knew no Slavic languages. Although word order had little or no effect on accuracy for participants overall, speakers of Slavic languages translated the noun-adjective stimuli more accurately overall.