Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach

Garry Kuwanto, Eno-Abasi E. Urua, Priscilla Amondi Amuok, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Verrah Otiende, Loice Emma Nanyanga, Teresiah W. Nyoike, Aniefon D. Akpan, Nsima Ab Udouboh, Idongesit Udeme Archibong, Idara Effiong Moses, Ifeoluwatayo A. Ige, Benjamin Ajibade, Olumide Benjamin Awokoya, Idris Abdulmumin, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Deontae Smith, Praise-EL Michaels, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Anietie Andy


Abstract
Low-resource languages often face challenges in acquiring high-quality language data due to the reliance on translation-based methods, which can introduce the translationese effect. This phenomenon results in translated sentences that lack fluency and naturalness in the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for data collection by leveraging storyboards to elicit more fluent and natural sentences. Our method involves presenting native speakers with visual stimuli in the form of storyboards and collecting their descriptions without direct exposure to the source text. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing our storyboard-based approach with traditional text translation-based methods in terms of accuracy and fluency. Human annotators and quantitative metrics were used to assess translation quality. The results indicate a preference for text translation in terms of accuracy, while our method demonstrates worse accuracy but better fluency in the language focused.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.992
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
11349–11360
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.992
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Garry Kuwanto, Eno-Abasi E. Urua, Priscilla Amondi Amuok, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Verrah Otiende, Loice Emma Nanyanga, Teresiah W. Nyoike, Aniefon D. Akpan, Nsima Ab Udouboh, Idongesit Udeme Archibong, Idara Effiong Moses, Ifeoluwatayo A. Ige, Benjamin Ajibade, Olumide Benjamin Awokoya, Idris Abdulmumin, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, et al.. 2024. Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 11349–11360, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach (Kuwanto et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.992.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.992.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip