arXiv:2509.23395cs.CL2025-09EMNLP被引 1

让机器翻译学会用脚注解释文化专有词,提升理解度。

Liaozhai through the Looking-Glass: On Paratextual Explicitation of Culture-Bound Terms in Machine Translation

  • 引入文学脚注理论,构建文化词显化新任务
  • 560组专家对齐脚注数据验证模型效果有限
  • 适合研究跨文化传播与可解释AI的学者

忠实传递语境化意义仍是当前机器翻译(MT)的挑战,尤其体现在文化专有词的处理上——这些表达或概念根植于特定语言与文化,难以直接转换。现有计算方法仅关注文本内解决方案,忽视专业译者常用的脚注和尾注等副文本工具。本文将热奈特(1987)的副文本理论形式化,提出面向机器翻译的副文本显化任务。我们基于《聊斋志异》四部英译本构建了包含560组专家对齐副文本的数据集,并评估大模型在有无推理链情况下的显化选择与内容生成。通过内在提示与代理检索方法实验表明该任务难度显著,人工评估显示模型生成的副文本虽能提升读者理解,但仍远逊于译者原创。统计分析还发现,专业译者间副文本使用差异极大,暗示文化中介本质是开放而非规范性的。研究结果表明副文本显化有望推动机器翻译超越语言对等,具备向单语解释与个性化适配扩展的潜力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The faithful transfer of contextually-embedded meaning continues to challenge contemporary machine translation (MT), particularly in the rendering of culture-bound terms--expressions or concepts rooted in specific languages or cultures, resisting direct linguistic transfer. Existing computational approaches to explicitating these terms have focused exclusively on in-text solutions, overlooking paratextual apparatus in the footnotes and endnotes employed by professional translators. In this paper, we formalize Genette's (1987) theory of paratexts from literary and translation studies to introduce the task of paratextual explicitation for MT. We construct a dataset of 560 expert-aligned paratexts from four English translations of the classical Chinese short story collection Liaozhai and evaluate LLMs with and without reasoning traces on choice and content of explicitation. Experiments across intrinsic prompting and agentic retrieval methods establish the difficulty of this task, with human evaluation showing that LLM-generated paratexts improve audience comprehension, though remain considerably less effective than translator-authored ones. Beyond model performance, statistical analysis reveals that even professional translators vary widely in their use of paratexts, suggesting that cultural mediation is inherently open-ended rather than prescriptive. Our findings demonstrate the potential of paratextual explicitation in advancing MT beyond linguistic equivalence, with promising extensions to monolingual explanation and personalized adaptation.

机器翻译文化词副文本可解释性

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