Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4
As a type of figurative language, an East Asian idiom condenses rich cultural background into only a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of candidate translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more high-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.
Code (1)
Tasks
TranslationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A Multilingual Parallel Corpus for Improving Machine Translation on Southeast Asian Languages
SEA-NLI: Natural Language Inference as a Lens into Southeast Asian Cultural Understanding
Frontier LLMs perform well in Western contexts, but remain poorly tested on underrepresented cultures such as those in Southeast Asia (SEA). Existing NLI benchmarks are largely Western-centric, translation-derived, or mo…
Natural Language InferenceMERIT: Multilingual Expert-Reward Informed Tuning for Chinese-Centric Low-Resource Machine Translation
Neural machine translation (NMT) from Chinese to low-resource Southeast Asian languages remains severely constrained by the extreme scarcity of clean parallel corpora and the pervasive noise in existing mined data. This …
Machine TranslationSimilar Southeast Asian Languages: Corpus-Based Case Study on Thai-Laotian and Malay-Indonesian
This paper illustrates the similarity between Thai and Laotian, and between Malay and Indonesian, based on an investigation on raw parallel data from Asian Language Treebank. The cross-lingual similarity is investigated …
Machine TranslationTranslationWord AlignmentCultural Awareness in Vision-Language Models: A Cross-Country Exploration
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural contexts, yet their internal biases remain poorly understood. In this work, we propose a novel framework to systematically evaluate how VLMs enc…
Retrieval