Translation ghost

Translation ghost is a semi-informal term we use at Diglot for a sentence that passes grammar checks but whose word order, rhythm, or emphasis still follows the writer's first language. Nothing is misspelled, no rule is visibly broken — yet a fluent reader senses the original language underneath, like a ghost image left on the page.

A common ghost in writers with Slavic first languages is inverted order after a fronted phrase: "In this article are considered three approaches to the problem" → "This article considers three approaches to the problem." Ukrainian and Russian happily let the subject arrive late; English wants subject-verb early and holds that order stubbornly. Other ghosts include theme-first emphasis ("Very important here is the sample size") and long build-ups before the verb finally appears.

How it differs from a calque: a calque copies words; a ghost copies structure. You can replace every word in a ghost sentence with better vocabulary and the ghost remains, because it lives in the order, not the lexis. That is why word-level editing never removes it — the sentence has to be rebuilt around English information flow: known information first, new information last, subject before verb.

Ghost structures are among the strongest markers of non-native writing, and automated detectors handle non-native writing badly — a Stanford study (Liang et al., published in Patterns, 2023) found AI detectors falsely flagged 61% of TOEFL essays by non-native English speakers. Trying to exorcise ghosts by machine-translating the whole draft trades one problem for another; restructuring sentence by sentence keeps the writing yours.