!Translate: When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 392–398 Varna, Sep 4–6, 2023 https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_044 392 !Translate : When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain Federico Garcea1, Margherita Martinelli2, Maja Miliˇcevi´c Petrovi´c1 and Alberto Barr´on-Cede˜no1 1 Universit`a di Bologna, Forl`ı, Italy 2 Stadler, Bussnang, Switzerland [federico.garcea2, maja.milicevic2, a.barron]@unibo.it martinellimargherita1997@gmail.com Abstract In the domain of cuisine, both dishes and in- gredients tend to be heavily rooted in the local context they belong to. As a result, the asso- ciated terms are often realia tied to specific cultures and languages. This causes difficulties for non-speakers of the local language and ma- chine translation (MT) systems alike, as it im- plies a lack of the concept and/or of a plausible translation. MT typically opts for one of two alternatives: keeping the source language terms untranslated or relying on a hyperonym/near- synonym in the target language, provided one exists. !Translate proposes a better alterna- tive: explaining. Given a cuisine entry such as a restaurant menu item, we identify culture- specific terms and enrich the output of the MT system with automatically retrieved definitions of the non-translatable terms in the target lan- guage, making the translation more actionable for the final user. 1 Introduction National and regional cuisines are heavily tied to their historical and socio-cultural back- ground (Civitello, 2011). Ingredients are often used differently within different cultures (e.g., whereas hibiscus represents a spice for chicken soup in the Philippines, it is the main ingredient for a fresh drink in Mexico1). Sometimes, an ingredient is widely present, but is used only in a specific region (e.g., stridoli2 grow across Europe, but only some varieties are edible and are used primarily in Ital- ian cuisine). Geographical and cultural diversity have led to the creation of unique local recipes that have no equivalents elsewhere; e.g., strozzapreti (an Italian pasta type) and shish kebab (a Middle 1Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hibiscus and https://es.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hibiscus 2https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silene_ vulgaris East grilled meat dish) are not available in other cultures and, as a result, are not translated into other languages. In translation studies, such cases fall under realia, words referring to objects of the local material culture associated with a lack of the relevant concept and/or of a plausible translation in other languages (Vlakhov and Florin, 1970). In human translation, realia are often left untranslated (transcribed, transliterated or adapted according to the norm of the target language), and can in addition be explained by the translator, in notes or directly in the text (Florin, 1993). In MT, the problem of untranslatable items is solved either by keeping the realia untranslated, or by translating them with a hyperonym or a near-synonym in the target language. In this demo, we focus on realia in Italian cui- sine. This is one of the most widespread cuisines in the world (Capatti and Montanari, 2005), whose most dishes lack a translation in other languages, and are instead denoted by the original Italian vo- cabulary. Leaving aside items turned international, such as pizza or cappuccino, this phenomenon can produce …

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