Although emotions are universal concepts, transferring the different shades of emotion from one language to another may not always be straightforward for human translators, let alone for machine translation systems. Moreover, the cognitive states are established by verbal explanations of experience which is shaped by both the verbal and cultural contexts. There are a number of verbal contexts where expression of emotions constitutes the pivotal component of the message. This is particularly true for User-Generated Content (UGC) which can be in the form of a review of a product or a service, a tweet, or a social media post. Recently, it has become common practice for multilingual websites such as Twitter to provide an automatic translation of UGC to reach out to their linguistically diverse users. In such scenarios, the process of translating the user's emotion is entirely automatic with no human intervention, neither for post-editing nor for accuracy checking. In this research, we assess whether automatic translation tools can be a successful real-life utility in transferring emotion in user-generated multilingual data such as tweets. We show that there are linguistic phenomena specific of Twitter data that pose a challenge in translation of emotions in different languages. We summarise these challenges in a list of linguistic features and show how frequent these features are in different language pairs. We also assess the capacity of commonly used methods for evaluating the performance of an MT system with respect to the preservation of emotion in the source text.

No abstract

Since the advent of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) approaches there has been a tremendous improvement in the quality of automatic translation. However, NMT output still lacks accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes makes major errors that need extensive postediting. This is particularly noticeable with texts that do not follow common lexico-grammatical standards, such as user generated content (UGC). In this paper we investigate the challenges involved in translating book reviews from Arabic into English, with particular focus on the errors that lead to incorrect translation of sentiment polarity. Our study points to the special characteristics of Arabic UGC, examines the sentiment transfer errors made by Google Translate of Arabic UGC to English, analyzes why the problem occurs, and proposes an error typology specific of the translation of Arabic UGC. Our analysis shows that the output of online translation tools of Arabic UGC can either fail to transfer the sentiment at all by producing a neutral target text, or completely flips the sentiment polarity of the target word or phrase and hence delivers a wrong affect message. We address this problem by fine-tuning an NMT model with respect to sentiment polarity showing that this approach can significantly help with correcting sentiment errors detected in the online translation of Arabic UGC.

No abstract