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arXiv · 2410.00988

Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4

Kenan Tang·Peiyang Song·Yao Qin·Xifeng Yan
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Abstract

As a type of figurative language, an East Asian idiom condenses rich cultural background into only a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of candidate translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more high-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.

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Kenan Tang, Peiyang Song, Yao Qin, Xifeng Yan. 2024-10-01. Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00988

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