Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4

Kenan Tang, Peiyang Song, Yao Qin, Xifeng Yan


Abstract
As a type of figurative language, an East Asian idiom condenses rich cultural background into only a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of candidate translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more high-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.544
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9285–9305
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.544
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kenan Tang, Peiyang Song, Yao Qin, and Xifeng Yan. 2024. Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9285–9305, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4 (Tang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.544.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.544.software.tgz
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.544.data.tgz