Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language
This addresses the challenge of metaphor-rich translation for constructed languages, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new, niche dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of translating English to Tamarian, a constructed language based on metaphorical references, by creating a parallel corpus of 456 utterances and training a T5-based machine translation model, achieving 76% accuracy on known utterances.
Tamarian, a fictional language introduced in the Star Trek episode Darmok, communicates meaning through utterances of metaphorical references, such as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" instead of "We should work together." This work assembles a Tamarian-English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels, and uses this to construct a parallel corpus of 456 English-Tamarian utterances. A machine translation system based on a large language model (T5) is trained using this parallel corpus, and is shown to produce an accuracy of 76% when translating from English to Tamarian on known utterances.