!Translate: When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain

Federico Garcea, Margherita Martinelli, Maja Milicević Petrović, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño


Abstract
In the domain of cuisine, both dishes and ingredients tend to be heavily rooted in the local context they belong to. As a result, the associated terms are often realia tied to specific cultures and languages. This causes difficulties for non-speakers of the local language and ma- chine translation (MT) systems alike, as it implies a lack of the concept and/or of a plausible translation. MT typically opts for one of two alternatives: keeping the source language terms untranslated or relying on a hyperonym/near-synonym in the target language, provided one exists. !Translate proposes a better alternative: explaining. Given a cuisine entry such as a restaurant menu item, we identify culture-specific terms and enrich the output of the MT system with automatically retrieved definitions of the non-translatable terms in the target language, making the translation more actionable for the final user.
Anthology ID:
2023.ranlp-1.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
392–398
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.44
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Federico Garcea, Margherita Martinelli, Maja Milicević Petrović, and Alberto Barrón-Cedeño. 2023. !Translate: When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 392–398, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
!Translate: When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain (Garcea et al., RANLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.44.pdf