Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach
Garry Kuwanto, Eno-Abasi E. Urua, Priscilla Amondi Amuok, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Verrah Otiende, Loice Emma Nanyanga, Teresiah W. Nyoike
Abstract
Low-resource languages often face challenges in acquiring high-quality language data due to the reliance on translation-based methods, which can introduce the translationese effect. This phenomenon results in translated sentences that lack fluency and naturalness in the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for data collection by leveraging storyboards to elicit more fluent and natural sentences. Our method involves presenting native speakers with visual stimuli in the form of storyboards and collecting their descriptions without direct exposure to the source text. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing our storyboard-based approach with traditional text translation-based methods in terms of accuracy and fluency. Human annotators and quantitative metrics were used to assess translation quality. The results indicate a preference for text translation in terms of accuracy, while our method demonstrates worse accuracy but better fluency in the language focused.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kuwanto-etal-2024-mitigating,
title = "Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages: The Storyboard Approach",
author = "Kuwanto, Garry and
Urua, Eno-Abasi E. and
Amuok, Priscilla Amondi and
Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and
Aremu, Anuoluwapo and
Otiende, Verrah and
Nanyanga, Loice Emma and
Nyoike, Teresiah W. and
Akpan, Aniefon D. and
Udouboh, Nsima Ab and
Archibong, Idongesit Udeme and
Moses, Idara Effiong and
Ige, Ifeoluwatayo A. and
Ajibade, Benjamin and
Awokoya, Olumide Benjamin and
Abdulmumin, Idris and
Aliyu, Saminu Mohammad and
Iro, Ruqayya Nasir and
Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and
Smith, Deontae and
Michaels, Praise-EL and
Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and
Wijaya, Derry Tanti and
Andy, Anietie",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.992/",
pages = "11349--11360"
}