Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4
<|reference_start|>Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4: 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.<|reference_end|>
@article{tang2024creative,
    title={Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4},
    author={Kenan Tang, Peiyang Song, Yao Qin, Xifeng Yan},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.00988},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2410.00988},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}