Integration of Dubbing Constraints into Machine Translation

Ashutosh Saboo, Timo Baumann


Abstract
Translation systems aim to perform a meaning-preserving conversion of linguistic material (typically text but also speech) from a source to a target language (and, to a lesser degree, the corresponding socio-cultural contexts). Dubbing, i.e., the lip-synchronous translation and revoicing of speech adds to this constraints about the close matching of phonetic and resulting visemic synchrony characteristics of source and target material. There is an inherent conflict between a translation’s meaning preservation and ‘dubbability’ and the resulting trade-off can be controlled by weighing the synchrony constraints. We introduce our work, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind, on integrating synchrony constraints into the machine translation paradigm. We present first results for the integration of synchrony constraints into encoder decoder-based neural machine translation and show that considerably more ‘dubbable’ translations can be achieved with only a small impact on BLEU score, and dubbability improves more steeply than BLEU degrades.
Anthology ID:
W19-5210
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 1: Research Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
94–101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5210
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5210
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ashutosh Saboo and Timo Baumann. 2019. Integration of Dubbing Constraints into Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 1: Research Papers), pages 94–101, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Integration of Dubbing Constraints into Machine Translation (Saboo & Baumann, WMT 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/W19-5210.pdf