The Punster’s Amanuensis: The Proper Place of Humans and Machines in the Translation of Wordplay

Tristan Miller


Abstract
The translation of wordplay is one of the most extensively researched problems in translation studies, but it has attracted little attention in the fields of natural language processing and machine translation. This is because today’s language technologies treat anomalies and ambiguities in the input as things that must be resolved in favour of a single “correct” interpretation, rather than preserved and interpreted in their own right. But if computers cannot yet process such creative language on their own, can they at least provide specialized support to translation professionals? In this paper, I survey the state of the art relevant to computational processing of humorous wordplay and put forth a vision of how existing theories, resources, and technologies could be adapted and extended to support interactive, computer-assisted translation.
Anthology ID:
W19-8707
Volume:
Proceedings of the Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology Workshop (HiT-IT 2019)
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Incoma Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
57–65
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-8707
DOI:
10.26615/issn.2683-0078.2019_007
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tristan Miller. 2019. The Punster’s Amanuensis: The Proper Place of Humans and Machines in the Translation of Wordplay. In Proceedings of the Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Technology Workshop (HiT-IT 2019), pages 57–65, Varna, Bulgaria. Incoma Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
The Punster’s Amanuensis: The Proper Place of Humans and Machines in the Translation of Wordplay (Miller, RANLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-8707.pdf