Learning from Many Voices: Literary MT Using Multi-Reference Human and Synthetic Data

arXiv:2412.18707 · cs.CL · Submitted 2024-12-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2024-12-24

Updated: 2026-09-15

Code: https://github.com/swsiwu/multi_ref_

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Multiple valid translations of a single literary work naturally exist.

Terminology

Abstract

Multiple valid translations of a single literary work naturally exist. We investigate strategies for leveraging these multi-reference datasets to improve literary machine translation. We propose a filtering framework based on semantic similarity to identify source texts whose references display meaningful variation while remaining faithful. We find that fine-tuning with medium to high semantic similarity data substantially outperforms low semantic similarity data. Moreover, using medium and high semantic similarity data achieves comparable or better performance than using the full unfiltered data. Synthetic translations generated by LLMs are economical and convenient alternatives to human expert translations; however, we find fine-tuning on human expert translations outperforms fine-tuning on synthetically augmented data in automatic metrics and human evaluations, demonstrating the indispensable value of human expert translations for fine-tuning literary machine translation models.

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