An Automatically Generated Inter-language Tailored to Speakers of Minority but Culturally Influenced Languages

摘要

Automatic localization of cultural resources and UIs is crucial for the survival of minority languages, for which there are insufficient parallel corpora (or no corpus at all) to build machine translation systems. This paper proposes a new way to compensate for such resource-scarce languages, based on the fact that most languages share a common vocabulary. Concretely, our approach leverages a family of languages closely related to the speaker's native language to construct translations in a coherent mix of these languages. Experimental results indicate that these translations can be easily understood, being also a useful aid for users who are not proficient in foreign languages. Therefore this work significantly contributes to HCI in two ways: it establishes a language that can improve how applications communicate to their users, and it reports insights on the user acceptance towards the method.