This paper attempts to identify challenges professional translators face when translating emotion-loaded texts as well as errors machine translation (MT) makes when translating this content. We invited ten Chinese-English translators to translate thirty posts of a Chinese microblog, and interviewed them about the challenges encountered during translation and the problems they believe MT might have. Further, we analysed more than five-thousand automatic translations of microblog posts to observe problems in MT outputs. We establish that the most challenging problem for human translators is emotion-carrying words, which translators also consider as a problem for MT. Analysis of MT outputs shows that this is also the most common source of MT errors. We also find that what is challenging for MT, such as non-standard writing, is not necessarily an issue for humans. Our work contributes to a better understanding of the challenges for the translation of microblog posts by humans and MT, caused by different forms of expression of emotion.

In this paper, we focus on how current Machine Translation (MT) engines perform on the translation of emotion-loaded texts by evaluating outputs from Google Translate according to a framework proposed in this paper. We propose this evaluation framework based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and perform detailed error analyses of the MT outputs. From our analysis, we observe that about 50% of MT outputs are erroneous in preserving emotions. After further analysis of the erroneous examples, we find that emotion carrying words and linguistic phenomena such as polysemous words, negation, abbreviation etc., are common causes for these translation errors.

This paper summarises the submissions our team, SURREY-CTS-NLP has made for the WASSA 2022 Shared Task for the prediction of empathy, distress and emotion. In this work, we tested different learning strategies, like ensemble learning and multi-task learning, as well as several large language models, but our primary focus was on analysing and extracting emotion-intensive features from both the essays in the training data and the news articles, to better predict empathy and distress scores from the perspective of discourse and sentiment analysis. We propose several text feature extraction schemes to compensate the small size of training examples for fine-tuning pretrained language models, including methods based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing, cosine similarity and sentiment score. Our best submissions achieve an average Pearson correlation score of 0.518 for the empathy prediction task and an F1 score of 0.571 for the emotion prediction task, indicating that using these schemes to extract emotion-intensive information can help improve model performance.