Cultural Adaptation of Menus: A Fine-Grained Approach

Zhonghe Zhang, Xiaoyu He, Vivek Iyer, Alexandra Birch


Abstract
Machine Translation of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) poses significant challenges. Recent work on CSI translation has shown some success using Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to different languages and cultures; however, a deeper analysis is needed to examine the benefits and pitfalls of each method. In this paper, we introduce the ChineseMenuCSI dataset, the largest for Chinese-English menu corpora, annotated with CSI vs Non-CSI labels and a fine-grained test set. We define three levels of CSI figurativeness for a more nuanced analysis and develop a novel methodology for automatic CSI identification, which outperforms GPT-based prompts in most categories. Importantly, we are the first to integrate human translation theories into LLM-driven translation processes, significantly improving translation accuracy, with COMET scores increasing by up to 7 points. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Henry8772/ChineseMenuCSI.
Anthology ID:
2024.wmt-1.120
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1258–1271
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.120
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhonghe Zhang, Xiaoyu He, Vivek Iyer, and Alexandra Birch. 2024. Cultural Adaptation of Menus: A Fine-Grained Approach. In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1258–1271, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cultural Adaptation of Menus: A Fine-Grained Approach (Zhang et al., WMT 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wmt-1.120.pdf