Abstract
Machine Translation (MT) has taken off dramatically in recent years due to the advent of Deep Learning methods and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has enhanced the quality of automatic translation significantly. While most work has covered the automatic translation of technical, legal and medical texts, the application of MT to literary texts and the human role in this process have been underexplored. In an effort to bridge the gap of this under-researched area, this paper presents the results of a study which seeks to evaluate the performance of three MT systems applied to two different literary genres, two novels (1984 by George Orwell and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen) and two poems (I Felt a Funeral in my Brain by Emily Dickinson and Siren Song by Margaret Atwood) representing different literary periods and timelines. The evaluation was conducted by way of the automatic evaluation metric BLEU to objectively assess the performance that the MT system shows on each genre. The limitations of this study are also outlined.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.nlp4tia-1.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP Tools and Resources for Translation and Interpreting Applications
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Varna, Bulgaria
- Editors:
- Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez, Antonio Pareja, Ruslan Mitkov
- Venues:
- NLP4TIA | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
- Note:
- Pages:
- 48–53
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4tia-1.7
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ana Isabel Cespedosa Vázquez and Ruslan Mitkov. 2023. Machine Translation of literary texts: genres, times and systems. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP Tools and Resources for Translation and Interpreting Applications, pages 48–53, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
- Cite (Informal):
- Machine Translation of literary texts: genres, times and systems (Cespedosa Vázquez & Mitkov, NLP4TIA-WS 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2023.nlp4tia-1.7.pdf