Crowd-Based Evaluation of Emotion Intensity Preservation in Spanish–Basque Tweet Machine Translation

Nora Aranberri


Abstract
Machine translation (MT) systems perform well on standard benchmarks, yet their ability to preserve emotional meaning in informal user-generated content—particularly for low-resource languages—remains underexplored. We investigate the preservation of emotion intensity in Spanish–Basque tweet translation, focusing on Basque, an under-represented language in MT research. We compile a small, controlled corpus of Spanish reaction tweets and evaluate Basque translations from three publicly available systems through a crowd-based study. While all systems achieve comparable and above mid-range accuracy and fluency, emotion intensity is systematically attenuated in the translations, with greater loss for more emotionally intense inputs. A follow-up on highly emotional tweets shows that LLM prompting reduces emotion loss, yet substantial attenuation remains, highlighting emotion preservation as a persistent challenge in Spanish–Basque MT.
Anthology ID:
2026.wassa-1.11
Volume:
The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Valentin Barriere, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger, Célia Nouri, Debora Nozza, Pranaydeep Singh
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
123–133
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nora Aranberri. 2026. Crowd-Based Evaluation of Emotion Intensity Preservation in Spanish–Basque Tweet Machine Translation. In The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026), pages 123–133, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Crowd-Based Evaluation of Emotion Intensity Preservation in Spanish–Basque Tweet Machine Translation (Aranberri, WASSA 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.11.pdf