Pun2Pun: Benchmarking LLMs on Textual-Visual Chinese-English Pun Translation via Pragmatics Model and Linguistic Reasoning

Yiran Rex Ma, Shan Huang, Yuting Xu, Ziyu Zhou, Yuanxi Wei


Abstract
Puns, as a unique form of linguistic creativity, present significant challenges in cross-lingual translation, particularly between linguistically distant languages like Chinese and English, where it’s often considered a “mission impossible”. We introduce Pun2Pun, a novel benchmark for quantitatively evaluating pun translation between Chinese and English while preserving both linguistic mechanisms and humorous effects. We propose the adaptation of Constant-Variable Optimization (CVO) Model for translation strategy and concomitant Overlap (Ovl) metric for translation quality assessment. Our approach provides a robust quantitative evaluation framework to assess models’ complex linguistic and cultural reasoning capabilities in pun translation. Through extensive experiments on both textual and visual puns, we demonstrate that our translation strategy model significantly improves performance, particularly for better-performing models. Our findings reveal exciting potentials and current limitations of LLMs in preserving sophisticated humor across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-srw.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Jin Zhao, Mingyang Wang, Zhu Liu
Venues:
ACL | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
331–354
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.23/
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Cite (ACL):
Yiran Rex Ma, Shan Huang, Yuting Xu, Ziyu Zhou, and Yuanxi Wei. 2025. Pun2Pun: Benchmarking LLMs on Textual-Visual Chinese-English Pun Translation via Pragmatics Model and Linguistic Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 331–354, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pun2Pun: Benchmarking LLMs on Textual-Visual Chinese-English Pun Translation via Pragmatics Model and Linguistic Reasoning (Ma et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.23.pdf