'Girl dinner' and hundreds of other new entries were added to Dictionary.com. How would Philly use them in a sentence? - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Dictionary

“Girl dinner” has its own dictionary entry now. Hopefully that doesn’t give you “the ick,” another new entry.

Dictionary.com announced Tuesday it has added more than 300 new entries to its online portfolio as part of its winter update.

New phrases include: girl dinner, bussin’, the ick, slow fashion, shacket, Barbiecore, bag holder, greedflation, and more.

“The intersection of language, learning, and culture is boundless, and we recognize that words have the power to shape thoughts, bridge gaps, and reflect our ever-evolving society,” Dictionary.com vice president of editorial John Kelly said. “Our semi-annual New Words announcement is meant to support a greater understanding of where language is, where it might go next — and why the constantly expanding universe of words matters for our everyday lives.”

Key themes and words for the winter 2024 update include pop culture and slang, science, fashion, entertainment, and more. The update also includes additions and revised definitions for existing entries, such as “mid,” which in modern slang can mean unimpressive.

Can you use it in a sentence?

Here’s some of Dictionary.com’s newest entries plus a guide to how we’d use the phrases in Philly.

Girl dinner: an often attractively presented collection of snacks that involve little preparation, such as small quantities of cold cuts, cheese, fruit, cherry tomatoes, etc., and often including items of little nutritional value, deemed sufficient to constitute a meal for one: typically the fare of young single women with little time or inclination to cook.

Used in a sentence: I don’t want a real entrée, I’m going to get girl dinner at Wawa tonight featuring Tastykake Krimpets, mac and cheese, and potato chips.

Shacket: a garment in the style of a button-down shirt, made of a thicker fabric and usually worn over other shirts.

Used in a sentence: South Philly wasn’t cold enough for a coat last week, but I still needed a light layer. So I picked up a shacket from August Moon.

Slow fashion: a movement among clothing producers and consumers that emphasizes eco-friendly, well-made clothing, maintenance and repair of garments to extend their lifespan, and a general reduction of one’s consumption of new clothing items.

Used in a sentence: Lobo Mau in Queen Village specializes in slow fashion, working with local factories and silk-screening original textiles in-house. They’re a zero-waste company.

The ick: The ick is a term used in dating to refer to a sudden feeling of disgust or repulsion to a dating partner someone was previously attracted to.

Used in a sentence: When Jason Kelce’s brother, Travis Kelce, started scream-singing “Viva Las Vegas” during his Super Bowl win celebration Sunday night, cameras cut to a shot of what looked like Taylor Swift contracting the ick. But later on, they appeared to remain very much in love.

Bussin’: great; wonderful; amazing.

Used in a sentence: Inquirer readers say the cheesesteaks at Dalessandro’s are bussin’.

Sound bath: an instance of sustained listening to the pleasant sounds emanating from a collection of singing bowls, bells, chimes, etc., used to aid in relaxation or meditation and believed to help restore physical and mental wellness.

Used in a sentence: Several yoga studios and meditation spaces in Philadelphia offer sound baths, including Evolve Yoga and Beyond in Paoli and Formation Sauna + Wellness in Northern Liberties.

Girl dad: a father of a daughter or daughters, especially one with only a daughter or daughters. (Girl mom, boy mom, and boy dad also received new entries)

Used in a sentence: Jason Kelce is the ultimate girl dad with footage of him playing with his three daughters always tugging at Eagles fans’ heartstrings.

See all of Dictionary.com’s new entries by visiting https://ift.tt/V2WdfCl.

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Dictionary.com is adding 327 new entries: Here are 7 you should know - The Hill - Dictionary

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(NEXSTAR) — New words get added to dictionaries often. Just a few months ago, Merriam-Webster added 690 words to its dictionary. Among those were numerous slang terms, like rizz and simp. The newest entries have become common terms in our vernacular in recent years, Merriam-Webster said when justifying the additions. 

On Tuesday, Dictionary.com announced its own big update, including 327 new entries, 173 new definitions, and more than 1,200 revised definitions. 

“It’s 2024, and the pace of language change is as rapid as it has ever been. Our lexicographers are updating the dictionary more frequently than ever, doing the human-scale work of documenting words across the vast spectrum of the always-evolving English language,” the site said in a blog post. 

This builds on an update Dictionary.com did in the fall, which included terms like “shower orange” and “mountweazel.” The latest additions include equally peculiar terms, as well as those that serve to describe “major topics of the day,” like climate, health, science, and economics. 

You can view Dictionary.com’s new terms here, but before you do, here are seven words you should know. 

Greedflation

Not to be confused with ‘shrinkflation,’ greedflation refers to a rise in prices unrelated to market pressure or other organic factors. It is instead “caused by corporate executives or boards of directors, property owners, etc., solely to increase profits that are already healthy or excessive,” according to Dictionary.com.

Beef prices could hit record highs in 2024, experts warn: Here’s why

A watchdog report released in June 2023 found some of the largest general consumer S&P 500 companies were potentially guilty of greedflation as they raised prices simply to boost their own profits, despite efforts by the Fed to control inflation, The Hill reports. The report pointed to companies like General Mills, Tyson Foods, and PepsiCo, who admitted to benefitting from the practice.

Keto flu

You may be able to figure out what this one means, but if not, Dictionary.com defines keto flu as “a temporary feeling of illness or physical unease often experienced by those starting” a keto diet. 

The keto diet has remained popular through the years, but as this term shows, it can cause problems for some. Keto flu has been a documented occurrence for years, with Harvard Health warning about the group of symptoms — fatigue, headache, brain fog, nausea, problems sleeping, irritability, and constipation — since 2018. In that post, Dr. Marcelo Campos explained it isn’t clear why exactly it can occur among those starting a keto diet, but it isn’t uncommon for “undesirable symptoms” to show up “in the first few days after changing what you eat.”

Bed rotting

The TikTok trend of “bed rotting” gained a lot of traction last summer. As negative as it may sound, many view it as a form of self-care. Dictionary.com describes bed rotting as “the practice of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or an electronic device, as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.”

Some health experts have urged caution toward it, though. Emily Mudd, PhD, a child psychologist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s, previously said it “can become a problem if you are doing it in the context to avoid something, or you feel like you are not physically or emotionally able to get out of bed.” 

‘Bed rotting’: Some call it self care, but experts urge caution

She warned that spending long periods of time in bed could lead to social isolation, which can in turn be a risk factor for depression and anxiety. 

Girl dinner

Another term to credit TikTok for, “girl dinner” refers to a meal similar to a charcuterie board. More specifically, Dictionary.com lists its definition as “an often attractively presented collection of snacks that involve little preparation, such as small quantities of cold cuts, cheese, fruit, cherry tomatoes, etc., deemed sufficient to constitute a meal for one.”

Even Popeyes jumped on the trend, offering a “Girl Dinner” tab on its menu where customers could order a variety of individual sides, minus the chicken. It’s not to be confused with “girl math,” a different TikTok trend in which users explained how practices like paying with cash is buying an item for free or returning an item equates to gaining money. 

Skiplagging

Travelers may already be familiar with “skiplagging,” or the practice of booking a cheaper flight that has a layover at your destination rather than a more expensive direct flight. So, for example, instead of flying directly from New York to Kansas City, you book a flight from New York to Denver that has a layover in Kansas City. 

My Facebook keeps chirping. How do I get it to stop?

Skiplagging is also known as hidden city ticketing and point beyond ticketing, terms you’ll find in any airline’s conditions of carriage. Last year, a teenager was detained and forced to purchase a new ticket after a gate agent became skeptical of his itinerary, which was booked using a site that helps passengers find skiplagged flights. While not illegal, airlines have been working to crack down on skiplagging for years. 

Range anxiety

If you have an electrical vehicle, you may already be familiar with this term, even if it isn’t in your vernacular. “Range anxiety” refers to the fear that your EV’s “battery will run out of power” before you can reach your destination or a charging station, Dictionary.com explains.

Studies have shown bitter cold temperatures can reduce an EV’s driving range and cause them to recharge slowly, a fact many across the U.S. experienced last month amid a days-long cold snap.

Global boiling

After Earth shattered global annual heat records in 2023, it’s no surprise a term like “global boiling” has entered our lingo. Dictionary.com defines the nonscientific term as being used to “emphasize the trend toward and severity of extreme heat events, especially in regard to public health.” 

A recently released study found that heat waves and wildfires that have become more common in the U.S. can increase bad air days, which could prove detrimental to many, like children and those with chronic illnesses. Even in winter, we’ve seen unprecedented warmth that could impact us in the long run, as January marked the eighth straight month that heat records were broken. 

Goodbye, snowy winters? New climate report offers dry projections

Other terms Dictionary.com has added include kennel cough, the infection dogs can catch; super fog, a combination of wildfire smoke and fog; and Barbicore, an aesthetic or style inspired by last summer’s blockbuster hit, “Barbie.”

Not a fan of these words? You can always suggest them for the list of “Banished Words” Lake Superior State University releases annually. Among the words you shouldn’t use in 2024 are hack, cringe-worthy, slay, and the aforementioned rizz. The university is accepting nominations for its 2025 list until November.

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Dictionary.com adds over 300 new entries, including 'girl dinner' - USA TODAY - Dictionary

It may have started off as a video that exploded into a meme, but "girl dinner" is now one of more than 300 words added to Dictionary.com's lexicon in 2024.

On Tuesday, Dictionary.com announced it was adding 327 new entries, 173 new definitions for existing entries and 1,228 revised definitions to the dictionary. The newly-added terms are broad, stemming from major topics of the day and range from economics and climate to health and wellness and slang.

“The intersection of language, learning, and culture is boundless, and we recognize that words have the power to shape thoughts, bridge gaps, and reflect our ever-evolving society,” John Kelly, vice president of editorial at Dictionary.com said in a release. “Our semi-annual New Words announcement is meant to support a greater understanding of where language is, where it might go next—and why the constantly expanding universe of words matters for our everyday lives.”

Here's a look at just some of the hundreds of words recently added to Dictionary.com, as well as their definitions and the origin behind the term. The full list of new words can be found on Dictionary.com.

Girl dinner

• Noun
• Often attractively presented collection of snacks that involve little preparation, such as small quantities of cold cuts, cheese, fruit, cherry tomatoes, etc., deemed sufficient to constitute a meal for one.
• Girl dinner went viral after TikTok user Olivia Maher used the term in a video in May 2023, possibly shortening an earlier version, hot girl dinner, that often included decadent or youth-maintaining food.

Mid

• Adjective
• Mediocre, unimpressive, or disappointing.

Bussin'

• Adjective
• Great; wonderful; amazing.
• Popular among Gen Z, this term originates in African American culture and is likely based on various senses of bust meaning “to explode,” “to do well,” or “to enjoy.”

The ick

• Noun
• A sudden feeling of disgust or dislike, often in response to the actions of another person.
• This phrase, popular in dating culture and on TikTok, is thought to trace back to the late 1990s TV show Ally McBeal. The ick is also used as an informal term for an illness, especially a cold or flu.

Cheat code

• Noun
• A ploy or technique that bypasses traditional methods or rules in order to improve oneself or one’s success.
• This more recent sense of the term is an extension of its use in the context of video games, in which it refers to a hidden command, code, etc., used to gain an advantage, such as by advancing levels or enhancing a character’s strengths.

Range anxiety

• Noun
• The apprehension or fear that an electric vehicle’s battery will run out of power beforereaching one’s intended destination or a charging station.

Skiplagging

• Noun
• The practice of purchasing an air ticket for a flight with a layover at one’s true destination, getting off at the layover point, and skipping the last leg of the flight: a workaround to avoid paying a higher fare for a direct flight to one’s destination.
• The verb form is skiplag, a compound of skip, “to jump or pass over,” and lag, “an instance of staying behind."

Bed rotting

• Noun
• The practice of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or an electronic device, as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.
• Despite the negative connotation of rotting, many use this term in a positive way to refer to what they consider a form of self-care. The verb form is bed rot.

Pretty privilege

• Noun
• An unearned and mostly unacknowledged societal advantage that a person has by fitting into the beauty standards of their culture.
• Pretty privilege uses the same construction as white privilege and similar terms.

Barbiecore

• Noun
• An aesthetic or style featuring playful pink outfits, accessories, decor, etc., celebrating and modeled on the wardrobe of the Barbie doll.
• We’re likely still fully within the trend of using -core to form names for niche aesthetics, such as cottagecore and normcore.

Slow fashion

• Noun
• A movement among clothing producers and consumers that emphasizes eco-friendly, well-made clothing, maintenance and repair of garments to extend their lifespan, and a general reduction of one’s consumption of new clothing items.
• This term is used in contrast with fast fashion. The fast/slow framing is perhaps best known for its use in the distinction between fast food and slow food, but it will likely continue to be applied in other contexts where there is interest in sustainable practices.

Bechdel test

• Noun
• A test of gender stereotyping and inequality in fiction, having a number of variations and used especially with movies, based on whether the work includes at least two fairly important female characters who talk to each other about something besides a man.
• The first recorded uses of the term Bechdel test come from between 2005 and 2010, but the concept was introduced by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 comic strip.

Tommy John surgery

• Noun
• An operation to repair a torn ligament on the inner side of the elbow by replacing it with a tendon from elsewhere in the body or from a donor.
• Common among baseball players, the surgery gets its name from pitcher Tommy John, on whom the procedure was first performed in 1974. It is formally called ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction.

Prebiotic

• Noun
• A substance containing dietary fiber that stimulates the growth or activity of beneficial bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

Greedflation

• Noun
• A rise in prices, rents, or the like, that is not due to market pressure or any other factor organic to the economy, but is caused by corporate executives or boards of directors, property owners, etc., solely to increase profits that are already healthy or excessive.
• The verb form is greedflate. Other recently added inflation words include shrinkflation and shadow inflation.

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Translating Race: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Jeferson Tenório's The Dark Side of Skin - Literary Hub - Translation

I translated and revised most of Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin while staying with a friend in Brooklyn, New York, for an impromptu residency. I drank too much coffee and typed all afternoon, until I could no longer process the emotions in the book and had to stop for the day.

After dinner, each night, my friend and I walked her dog to the park, and that was my chance to see the cherry blossoms in bloom, people-watch, get some fresh air, and think about something else. Instead, all I did was think about my translation of this book. Bits of dialogue that sounded too stiff, too formal, too dry. Sounds I had yet to capture. Metaphors I hadn’t figured out how to land.

As we walked by the bougie kosher coffee shops in Crown Heights, I talked to my friend about this book she hadn’t read, by an author she didn’t know, in a language she didn’t speak, from a country she’d never visited. From the outside, it might have looked futile, but every time we talked answers came to me.

Translation (and writing) has a way of inserting itself into my daily life: phrases will come to me in the shower, while I wash the dishes, while I chop vegetables for dinner, or sip wine with a friend. My body relaxes and my mind tunes to a character’s voice like a radio.

On one of those nights, while my friend’s dog ran free in the off-leash area, I talked about struggling to find the right translation of the title. The original title “O avesso da pele” sounds almost anatomical to me, the way Kerry James Marshall’s painting “Beauty Examined” manages to be both an aesthetic and sociological experience, a painting of a nude “female blk subject” posing as scientific illustration. It sounds both academic and artistic, both figurative and literal: it evoked the opposite of skin and racism, made me imagine someone with their skin put on inside out.

“The Opposite of Skin” captures one half of the meaning but not the other. Same for “Flipside of the Skin,” “Under the Skin,” “Behind the Skin.” They were all too literal, too easy and insufficient, too light. Earlier that day, before our walk, I’d reread parts of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I told my friend, looking for a solution, something to do with wearing one’s own skin like a disguise, wearing a Black skin in a white world. Her dog ran back to where we stood and sat by our feet. We watched a tiny chihuahua sniff a stranger’s shoes, a Pitbull walk by in a Knicks dog jersey, a child zoom by on a scooter. It was a lovely spring evening in a quiet corner of the city.

“It sounds like a very dark book,” my friend finally said, and I nodded. And then it hit me: The Dark Side of Skin. It’s further from the original than some of the other options, less literal, more metaphorical (with no “the” before “skin”), and this is exactly what makes it work as a title. It’s as idiomatic in English as “O avesso da pele” is in Portuguese, and it’s just as urgent, unapologetically direct, sure of itself, with the word “dark” carrying more than one meaning. It sets the right tone for the book, gives it the right amount of weight and gravity, and sounds just like something Henrique might have said on my translation radio.

Part of me would love for the issues in this book to be simpler, less painful.

I tried to maintain a similar slow-burning sense of urgency throughout the book as I revised my translation. Black people in Brazil are disproportionately killed by police: in 2020, the year the book was originally published, 78 percent of the people murdered by police in Brazil were Black. In October of that year, George Floyd was murdered in the US. A month later, João Alberto Silveira Freitas was murdered by white security guards at a Carrefour in Porto Alegre, the same city where Henrique lived and died.

Literature has historically replicated this disproportion, indeed, this erasure. According to data collected by the University of Brasília, 90 percent of the books published in Brazil between 1965 and 2014 are by white writers. Only 4.5 percent of the protagonists of all novels published in Brazil between 2004 and 2014 were Black (though they represent 50 percent of the population), and most of them are incarcerated, enslaved, or doing domestic or sex work—or else fully idealized, perfect community members always in service of others, unaffected by social issues, the exception to the rule. Tenório’s Henrique is neither of those extremes.

Instead, he is a regular man, imperfect and beloved, contradictory and misunderstood. His passion for canonical literature, his commitment to teaching, his complicated relationship to women, his struggles with his racial identity, his shortcomings as a father, the good and the bad, only make him all the more human, and therefore all the more needed.

Finally, one last thing kept me up at night and required multiple walks to the park as I revised this book: whether to capitalize “Black,” as is the norm in the US, where I live. The New York Times and major news organizations like the Associated Press have been capitalizing all instances of “Black” in the racial and cultural sense since 2020.

Soon after, Kwame Anthony Appiah published an op-ed in The Atlantic making a case for the capitalization of “White” as an identity rather than a color. US racial terms, with their shifting connotations, don’t always correspond to the racial debate in Brazil. Ultimately, after much back and forth with the editors and author of this book, I decided not to impose these expectations or conventions on the Brazilian text, on the characters’ world and experiences. Their experiences don’t need my intervention.

I told my friend on one of our walks about our decision, my wise and patient friend who housed me and fed me and let me talk her ears off as I worked on this book: “We’re going to honor the racialized language in the original. I don’t want to sanitize it, or make it more palatable to an English-speaking audience for the sake of it.” She asked, “But you wanted to, didn’t you?” I nodded. Yes, I did.

Part of me would love for the issues in this book to be simpler, less painful. Instead, I let the racialized language live in the novel as it ought to, to stand as is. It was the best I could do at this point in time, at this point in history. My greatest hope is that years from now I’d make a different choice.

__________________________________

From The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato. Copyright © 2024. Available from Charco Press.

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A U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary's Passion for the Chassidic Masters - Lawyer, government official and China ... - Chabad.org - Translation

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A U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary's Passion for the Chassidic Masters - Lawyer, government official and China ...  Chabad.org

First Mental Health Metaphor Dictionary to raise awareness of disorders - Medical Xpress - Dictionary

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Metaphors are not just literary devices for writers to embellish their texts. They are linguistic tools used in everyday life, in most cases with the aim of better understanding and conveying the reality of the world around us.

Researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) have now developed the first Mental Health Metaphor Dictionary, a pioneering repository that brings together and exemplifies the most important conceptual metaphors used in Spanish by people with serious mental illnesses, mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The repository is based on first-person accounts of what it is like to live with a particular mental disorder and can be useful for mental health communicators and professionals, relatives of people diagnosed with one of these illnesses and even for the people with these disorders themselves. The dictionary is presented in an article published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

According to Marta Coll-Florit and Salvador Climent Roca, researchers from the Linguistic Applications Interuniversity Research Group (GRIAL) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, who coordinated the development and creation of the repository, "This is a tool to raise visibility and awareness in society about the suffering of people with mental illnesses. We believe that this dictionary can help us all to reflect on the way we talk about mental health and to realize the power of our words."

Metaphors are not neutral

The dictionary is one of the results of the MOMENT project, which seeks to identify the metaphors used in the field of mental health and the underlying conceptualizations. The researchers said, "The metaphors we use are not neutral, but have the power to highlight certain aspects of reality while potentially obscuring others. They're likely to reveal latent ideas that don't come out explicitly in our discourse, but may be filtered through figurative language.

"For example, it's not the same to say 'you have to fight your illness' as it is to say 'you have to live with your illness': The first metaphor emphasizes the struggle between the person and the disorder, whereas the second emphasizes the person's acceptance of their situation."

One of the project's main research conclusions is that this type of metaphor can have beneficial or harmful uses in public discourse and in the discourse of those affected and those who interact with them. "Beneficial uses are those that convey empowerment, control or positive emotions; in other cases, they look to present a problem by separating the negative aspects from the situation as a whole," they explained.

Metaphors that serve these purposes are called "empowering metaphors" and are recommended for use "in public discourse and in relationships with people diagnosed with mental disorders." The researchers added that "their use should be encouraged by the people with these disorders themselves in order to avoid pejorative views of their situation."

A window into the feelings of people with mental disorders

The dictionary is organized both alphabetically and thematically into three broad areas: metaphors of living with a mental disorder, metaphors of communication and social context, and metaphors of medicine and professional practice.

All the metaphors are grouped around different key concepts and come with several examples. As the researchers explained, by systematizing and exemplifying the metaphors used by these people, we can gain a deeper insight into what they "really think and experience." It is also a way for them to feel "more understood and less alone, realizing that their feelings and experiences are shared by more people."

The advantages of blogs and social media

One of the key features of the repository is that all the metaphors are taken from texts posted in Spanish on blogs or on X (formerly Twitter). These communication channels have an important advantage over other written media.

"The authors' words are not filtered by an external interviewer, but come from a genuine and spontaneous willingness to share a lived experience on social media. In addition, individuals can use the relative anonymity of the internet to reveal things they would not, for example, discuss in a face-to-face research setting. For this reason, the range of metaphors found is much wider than in previous similar studies."

This approach has been useful in collecting the many metaphors in the repository that criticize the medical profession or highlight the suffering caused by social stigma and discrimination, showing "how patients seek greater empathy and understanding of their suffering from both medical staff and the wider community." In this regard, the researchers stressed that the dictionary can be valuable in promoting "more respectful discourse" on mental health by public institutions and the press.

A tool for detecting psychopathology

Finally, the Mental Health Metaphor Dictionary can be used as a gateway to detecting psychopathology. "Knowing which conceptual metaphors are most commonly used to express mental distress could help families or people close to those affected to identify possible disorders," the researchers explained.

Likewise, although it cannot be used directly as a diagnostic tool, it could be used to "identify which stage of the disorder the patient is in, according to the type of metaphors used, or to analyze whether therapy has been successful."

A pioneering initiative

This collection of metaphors is the first of its kind. While there are a number of domain-independent repositories of conceptual metaphors based on English texts, there are very few domain-specific repositories in other languages.

In fact, in the review, they found only two repositories focused on specific subject areas: cognition and health. "Although these subject repositories are potentially the most useful for society, they are the rarest," they concluded.

More information: Marta Coll-Florit et al, Metaphor repositories: the case of the mental health metaphor dictionary, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2023). DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqad058

Provided by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Citation: First Mental Health Metaphor Dictionary to raise awareness of disorders (2024, January 31) retrieved 31 January 2024 from https://ift.tt/SITFNKa

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

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How Large Language Models Fare Against 'Classic' Machine Translation Challenges - Slator - Translation

In a January 17, 2024 paper, a group of researchers from the University of Macau, University College London (UCL), and Tencent AI Lab explored the performance of large language models (LLMs) against “classic” machine translation (MT) challenges.

The six MT challenges, originally proposed by Philipp Koehn and Rebecca Knowles in 2017, include domain mismatch, amount of parallel data, rare word prediction, translation of long sentences, attention model as word alignment, and sub-optimal beam search.

For their experiments, the researchers used the Llama2-7b model, focusing on the German-to-English language pair. They explained that “English and German are high-resource languages in the Llama2 pretraining data, which ensures the model’s proficiency in these two languages.”

They found that LLMs reduce dependence on parallel data during pretraining for major languages and they improve the translation of long sentences and entire documents. Yet, challenges like domain mismatch and rare word prediction persist. Unlike neural MT models, LLMs face new challenges: translation of low-resource languages and human-aligned evaluation.

Document-Level

Specifically, the researchers found that LLMs mitigate reliance on bilingual data during pretraining for high-resource languages, with even a small amount of parallel data boosting translation performance. Surprisingly, an increased abundance of parallel data yields only marginal improvement and, in some cases, a decline in LLM translation system performance, challenging the common belief that more parallel data enhances translation quality. The researchers recommended supervised fine-tuning as a more advantageous approach for leveraging additional parallel data compared to continued pretraining.

The research community should “consider how to efficiently utilize parallel data for the enhancement of LLM translation systems, thereby offering a potential direction for future studies to optimize bilingual knowledge in the pursuit of improved MT performance using LLMs,” according to the researchers.

Another addressed challenge was the translation of long sentences, a significant hurdle for MT systems. LLMs demonstrated an ability to tackle this challenge effectively excelling in translating sentences with fewer than 80 words and consistently performing well at the document level with approximately 500 words. 

“LLMs excel in translating extended sentences and entire documents, underscoring their effectiveness as a promising solution for addressing challenges associated with long-sentence and document-level translation tasks,” they said.

Unresolved Challenges

The researchers explored whether the rich knowledge of LLMs could address domain mismatch in translation tasks. While LLMs showed robust performance in in-domain translation tasks, their progress in out-of-domain tasks was modest, encountering challenges like terminology mismatch, style discrepancies, and hallucinations.

Predicting rare words in the realm of LLMs remains another significant challenge, leading to omissions in translations. The researchers underscored the persistent and unresolved nature of this issue, emphasizing its significance in the field.

Mixed Results

Word alignment, involving the identification of word pairs with similar semantic information in a given translation pair, was also explored. The researchers tested the feasibility of extracting word alignment from LLM attention weights, revealing that it was not a viable option. Despite this, the process provided valuable insights into model interpretability, they said.

In the context of inference, two major issues are inference strategies — including beam search and sampling — and inference efficiency due to the abnormal size of LLMs, as the researchers explained. They first tested the performance difference of beam search and sampling and they found that beam search is not necessarily suboptimal in LLMs.

In terms of inference efficiency, they found that LLMs require an average of 30 seconds compared to the 0.3 seconds of MT models, raising concerns about real-time deployment in scenarios requiring fast translation. “The longer inference time of LLMs may impede their real-time deployment in scenarios where fast translation is required,” they said.

Slator Pro Guide: Translation AI

The Slator Pro Guide presents 10 new and impactful ways that LLMs can be used to enhance translation workflows.

New Challenges

Besides these six “classic” MT challenges, they identified two new challenges within the realm of LLMs. One pertains to the translation quality for language pairs inadequately represented during the pretraining stage and the other involves evaluating translation quality.

The researchers found that translation performance is significantly affected by the available resources for each language, emphasizing the need for a diverse and balanced dataset during the pretraining of LLMs to ensure equitable performance across languages.

Evaluation issues have also come to the forefront. They tested the quality of LLMs using both automatic — BLEU and COMET — and human evaluation metrics and found a moderate negative correlation between them. This emphasizes the importance of combining both evaluation methods and indicates that current metrics may not fully capture the nuances appreciated by human evaluators.

According to the researchers, this calls for further research to develop and refine evaluation methods aligned with human preferences, especially as language models become more complex and capable. “This human-centered approach to evaluation will be crucial in ensuring that our translation models are not only technically proficient but also practically useful and acceptable to end users.” they said.

Finally, the researchers called for future research to focus on refining evaluation methods and testing approaches on more advanced models.

Authors: Jianhui Pang, Fanghua Ye, Longyue Wang, Dian Yu, Derek F. Wong, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu.

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