Measuring the creativity gap: entropy in Germanic translations of Nordic noir

Translation is a creative process requiring lexical and stylistic choices. Yet empirical methods to measure translator creativity remain understudied. Existing computational creativity metrics such as Divergent Semantic Integration (DSI) measure semantic unexpectedness but remain unvalidated for Scandinavian languages (Patterson et al., 2023; Johnson et al., 2023). This study proposes entropy and surprisal as alternative measures well-suited to translation, building on Liu, Liu, and Lei's (2022) validation of entropy as a translation simplification indicator. The project aims to investigate whether entropy analysis distinguishes creative human translation from formulaic machine translation across closely related Germanic languages.