文献类型：期刊文献

英文题名：On the Systematic Challenges of Culturally Loaded Machine Translation: Dream of the Red Chamber as the Cultural Lens

作者：Wang, Yiming[1]; Di, Jiayuan[2]

机构：[1] School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; [2] School of Foreign Languages, East China University of Science and Technology, China

年份：2026

外文期刊名：arXiv

收录：EI(收录号：20260422311)

语种：英文

外文关键词：Computational linguistics - Machine translation

摘要：Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms. Although large language models (LLMs) have enabled MT systems to achieve human-like quality in many scenarios, their ability to handle culturally loaded expressions remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically investigate the challenges posed by culturally loaded translation in LLM-based MT systems. We construct a Chinese-Japanese bilingual dataset from the culturally representative corpus Dream of the Red Chamber1, containing 500 segments across diverse cultural categories. Using a comprehensive evaluation protocol, we reveal three main challenges: (1) task challenges, where frontier LLMs exhibit notable performance gaps and struggle with culturally loaded content; (2) human evaluation challenges, where evaluator backgrounds lead to substantial disagreement in translation judgments; and (3) automatic evaluation challenges, where widely used metrics fail to reliably assess translation quality for this task. These findings may offer valuable insights for culture-oriented translation research in both computational science and linguistics. Copyright ? 2026, The Authors. All rights reserved.