@inproceedings{nagato-matsuzaki-2025-character,
    title = "Character-Aware {E}nglish-to-{J}apanese Translation of Fictional Dialogue Using Speaker Embeddings and Back-Translation",
    author = "Nagato, Ayuna  and
      Matsuzaki, Takuya",
    editor = "Haddow, Barry  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.10/",
    pages = "180--190",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-341-8",
    abstract = "In Japanese, the form of utterances often reflect speaker-specific character traits, such as gender and personality, through the choise of linguistic elements including personal pronouns and sentence-final particles. However, such elements are not always available in English and a character{'}s traits are often not directly expressed in English utterances, which can lead to character-inconsistent translations of English novels into Japanese. To address this, we propose a character-aware translation framework that incorporates speaker embeddings. We first train a speaker embedding model by masking the expressions in Japanese utterances that manifest the speaker{'}s traits and learning to predict them. The resulting embeddings are then injected into a machine translation model. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms conventional fine-tuning in preserving speaker-specific character traits in translations."
}