Challenges of Human vs Machine Translation of Emotion-Loaded C hinese Microblog Texts (2023)

Abstract: This paper attempts to identify challenges professional translators face when translating emotion-loaded texts as well as errors machine translation (MT) makes when translating this content. We invited ten Chinese-English translators to translate thirty posts of a Chinese microblog, and interviewed them about the challenges encountered during translation and the problems they believe MT might have. Further, we analysed more than five-thousand automatic translations of microblog posts to observe problems in MT outputs. We establish that the most challenging problem for human translators is emotion-carrying words, which translators also consider as a problem for MT. Analysis of MT outputs shows that this is also the most common source of MT errors. We also find that what is challenging for MT, such as non-standard writing, is not necessarily an issue for humans. Our work contributes to a better understanding of the challenges for the translation of microblog posts by humans and MT, caused by different forms of expression of emotion.

## introduction user-generated texts (ugt) on social media commonly express sentiments and emotions. the emotion-loaded nature and the non-standard characteristics of ugt make translation difficult. this is true for texts on sina weibo 1 , the largest chinese microblog platform, which have their own characteristics due to the unique features of the chinese language. since chinese is a tonal language, there are many characters sharing the same or similar pronunciation, but with quite different meanings. similar to this feature, homographs that look very similar in writing but with different meanings and pronunciations are also common in chinese, as there are many logograms and morphograms in chinese. netizens use this feature to create emotion-carrying slang by replacing the original character/word with a homophone or homograph character/word to avoid censorship. for example, "草泥马" caonima, literally meaning "grass mud horse", is coined to refer to a swear word as it shares a similar pronunciation. it is used to show a strong angry emotion, but with some humour @xcite . these features of emotion-loaded chinese microblog texts might pose challenges for human and machine translation (mt), which are different from translating tweets such as hashtags or non-standard orthography in other languages or other types of texts @xcite . in this paper, we endeavour to investigate the challenges of translating emotion-loaded chinese microblog texts for humans and mt, with a special focus on answers from professional translators to the question: what are the challenges for humans and mt in the translation of emotion-loaded texts? we also evaluated outputs of an mt engine and compared the problems identified in mt outputs with the challenges mentioned by professional translators. in the rest of this paper, section 2 reviews related work in translation studies and mt studies on emotion. section 3 starts with a description of the dataset used in this paper and explains the methodology for finding out the challenges from both professional translators' perspective and the output of mt. section 4 shows the results of interviews with translators and the analysis of mt outputs. section 5 concludes the paper by summarising our findings and indicating future research directions. ## data and methodology this section introduces the dataset used in the research, and explains the methodology followed to identify challenges when translating emotion-loaded texts. ## 4 results and discussions this section analyses the data collected in the experiments described in the previous section. section 4.1 shows results of the analysis of translations and interviews from translators. section 4.2 summarises results of the analysis of mt outputs and compares similarities and differences of the challenges for translators and mt. ## conclusion our paper investigates challenges professional translators face when translating emotionloaded texts, as well as errors mt makes when translating this content. we interviewed 10 professional translators about the challenges they meet when translating this type of texts and the challenges they expect mt to have. we compared results from the interviews with the errors we identified in real mt outputs. we establish that the most challenging problem for both human and mt is emotion-carrying words. we also find that what is more challenging for mt, such as non-standard writing, is not necessarily an issue for human translators. in future work, we plan to explore how these findings can be used to train human translators and improve automatic translation of emotions. no. translations 0 drizzling, drizzling, drizzling. maybe when i grow up, i become less courageous and think more. i often feel panic and uneasiness in my heart, turmoil and chaos. my heart is not calm enough, my ambition is not strong enough. flowers are in blossom now but will die out every soon.