Margherita Martinelli


2023

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!Translate: When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain
Federico Garcea | Margherita Martinelli | Maja Milicević Petrović | Alberto Barrón-Cedeño
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

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.