Graph-Assisted Culturally Adaptable Idiomatic Translation for Indic languages

Pratik Rakesh Singh, Kritarth Prasad, Mohammadi Zaki, Pankaj Wasnik


Abstract
Translating multi-word expressions (MWEs) and idioms requires a deep understanding of the cultural nuances of both the source and target languages. This challenge is further amplified by the one-to-many nature of idiomatic translations, where a single source idiom can have multiple target-language equivalents depending on cultural references and contextual variations. Traditional static knowledge graphs (KGs) and prompt-based approaches struggle to capture these complex relationships, often leading to suboptimal translations. To address this, we propose an IdiomCE, an adaptive graph neural network (GNN) based methodology that learns intricate mappings between idiomatic expressions, effectively generalizing to both seen and unseen nodes during training. Our proposed method enhances translation quality even in resource-constrained settings, facilitating improved idiomatic translation in smaller models. We evaluate our approach on multiple idiomatic translation datasets using reference-less metrics, demonstrating significant improvements in translating idioms from English to various Indian languages
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.367
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7029–7044
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.367/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pratik Rakesh Singh, Kritarth Prasad, Mohammadi Zaki, and Pankaj Wasnik. 2025. Graph-Assisted Culturally Adaptable Idiomatic Translation for Indic languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 7029–7044, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Graph-Assisted Culturally Adaptable Idiomatic Translation for Indic languages (Singh et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.367.pdf