Translating Across Cultures: LLMs for Intralingual Cultural Adaptation

Understand

LLMs are increasingly being deployed for multilingual applications and have demonstrated impressive translation capabilities between several low and high-resource languages.

• An aspect of translation that often gets overlooked is that of cultural adaptation, or modifying source culture references to suit the target culture.
• While specialized translation models still outperform LLMs on the machine translation task when viewed from the lens of correctness, they are not sensitive to cultural differences often requiring manual correction.
• LLMs on the other hand have a rich reservoir of cultural knowledge embedded within its parameters that can be potentially exploited for such applications.