Translating Politeness Across Cultures: Case of Hindi and English
This work addresses cross-cultural communication challenges for machine translation applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing politeness theories without introducing new methods.
The paper studied how politeness is translated between Hindi and English using a parallel corpus, finding that politeness strategies often differ and can lead to misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication.
In this paper, we present a corpus based study of politeness across two languages-English and Hindi. It studies the politeness in a translated parallel corpus of Hindi and English and sees how politeness in a Hindi text is translated into English. We provide a detailed theoretical background in which the comparison is carried out, followed by a brief description of the translated data within this theoretical model. Since politeness may become one of the major reasons of conflict and misunderstanding, it is a very important phenomenon to be studied and understood cross-culturally, particularly for such purposes as machine translation.