Margherita Martinelli


2023

In the domain of cuisine, both dishes and ingredients tend to be heavily rooted in the local context they belong to. As a result, the associated terms are often realia tied to specific cultures and languages. This causes difficulties for non-speakers of the local language and ma- chine translation (MT) systems alike, as it implies a lack of the concept and/or of a plausible translation. MT typically opts for one of two alternatives: keeping the source language terms untranslated or relying on a hyperonym/near-synonym in the target language, provided one exists. !Translate proposes a better alternative: explaining. Given a cuisine entry such as a restaurant menu item, we identify culture-specific terms and enrich the output of the MT system with automatically retrieved definitions of the non-translatable terms in the target language, making the translation more actionable for the final user.