Utilizing Longer Context than Speech Bubbles in Automated Manga Translation

Hiroto Kaino, Soichiro Sugihara, Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Takashi Ninomiya, Joshua B. Tanner, Shonosuke Ishiwatari


Abstract
This paper focuses on improving the performance of machine translation for manga (Japanese-style comics). In manga machine translation, text consists of a sequence of speech bubbles and each speech bubble is translated individually. However, each speech bubble itself does not contain sufficient information for translation. Therefore, previous work has proposed methods to use contextual information, such as the previous speech bubble, speech bubbles within the same scene, and corresponding scene images. In this research, we propose two new approaches to capture broader contextual information. Our first approach involves scene-based translation that considers the previous scene. The second approach considers broader context information, including details about the work, author, and manga genre. Through our experiments, we confirm that each of our methods improves translation quality, with the combination of both methods achieving the highest quality. Additionally, detailed analysis reveals the effect of zero-anaphora resolution in translation, such as supplying missing subjects not mentioned within a scene, highlighting the usefulness of longer contextual information in manga machine translation.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1505
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
17337–17342
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1505
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hiroto Kaino, Soichiro Sugihara, Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Takashi Ninomiya, Joshua B. Tanner, and Shonosuke Ishiwatari. 2024. Utilizing Longer Context than Speech Bubbles in Automated Manga Translation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17337–17342, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Utilizing Longer Context than Speech Bubbles in Automated Manga Translation (Kaino et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1505.pdf