Memes and Puns in Translation: an MT Evaluation from English into Brazilian Portuguese
Citation:
Rafael Carvalho Falleiros, 'Memes and Puns in Translation: an MT Evaluation from English into Brazilian Portuguese', [thesis], Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin thesesDownload Item:
Abstract:
This work aims to solve a gap in research in machine translation (MT) of humorous pieces, specifically memes and puns from English into Brazilian Portuguese. The reason for this study is the importance that humor has played in social media, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic as a form of comic relief – memes are continuously produced in massive numbers, and puns are historically relevant for Humor Studies. Despite the number of linguistic and psychological studies on humor, the scientific literature of the field indicates a lack of solid implementations in MT and humor, both in academia and in industry. Thus, this research translated nine memes and six puns using freely available MT systems, i.e. Google Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, and DeepL Translate, in order to identify if and how humor is conveyed by these applications. To carry out this research, a User-Centered Translation (UCT) approach was chosen alongside Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) definitions. Therefore, two surveys based on UCT were filled out by thirty volunteers. Furthermore, a translation quality analysis was performed by an invited professional translator using MQM as a basis. The results of both analyses indicate that, in general, Google Translate had a better performance in conveying humor, despite its error in register. It was followed by a tied overall functioning of Bing Translator and DeepL Translate, the latter presenting more errors regarding the wrong variety of Portuguese in the translations, and the first showing flaws on untranslated terms and mistranslations. Interestingly we found that images are vital for memes’ understanding and the source text also influences users’ perception. Hence, we concluded that humor can be conveyed in a basic MT outputs, which can be useful for non-native speakers or users who want to have a basic idea of the meme or pun’s semantics.
Author: Carvalho Falleiros, Rafael
Advisor:
Castilho, SheilaQualification name:
Master of PhilosophyPublisher:
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of Languages, Literature and Cultural StudiesType of material:
thesisCollections
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Literary TranslationMetadata
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