Translating Across Cultures: LLMs for Intralingual Cultural Adaptation
Pushpdeep Singh, Mayur Patidar, Lovekesh Vig · 2024
LLMs are increasingly being deployed for multilingual applications and have demonstrated impressive translation capabilities between several low and high-resource languages.An aspect of translation that often gets overlooked is that of cultural adaptation, or modifying source culture references to suit the target culture.While specialized translation models still outperform LLMs on the machine translation task when viewed from the lens of correctness, they are not sensitive to cultural differences often requiring manual correction.LLMs on the other hand have a rich reservoir of cultural knowledge embedded within its parameters that can be potentially exploited for such applications.In this paper, we define the task of cultural adaptation and create an evaluation framework to evaluate the performance of modern LLMs for cultural adaptation and analyze their crosscultural knowledge while connecting related concepts across different cultures.We also analyze possible issues with automatic adaptation.We hope that this task will offer more insight into the cultural understanding of LLMs and their creativity in cross-cultural scenarios. NOTE: This paper contains examples that may be offensive.Rachel Green: Wow, this is so cool, you guys.The entire city is blacked out!Monica Geller: Mom says it's all of Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn and Queens, and they have no idea when it'