Liaozhai through the Looking-Glass: On Paratextual Explicitation of Culture-Bound Terms in Machine Translation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23395v1
• Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:27:36 GMT
• Title: Liaozhai through the Looking-Glass: On Paratextual Explicitation of Culture-Bound Terms in Machine Translation
• Authors: Sherrie Shen, Weixuan Wang, Alexandra Birch,
• Abstract summary: We formalize Genette's (1987) theory of paratexts from literary and translation studies to introduce the task of paratextual explicitation for machine translation.<n>We construct a dataset of 560 expert-aligned paratexts from four English translations of the classical Chinese short story collection Liaozhai.<n>Our findings demonstrate the potential of paratextual explicitation in advancing machine translation beyond linguistic equivalence.
• Score: 70.43884512651668
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: The faithful transfer of contextually-embedded meaning continues to challenge contemporary machine translation (MT), particularly in the rendering of culture-bound terms--expressions or concepts rooted in specific languages or cultures, resisting direct linguistic transfer. Existing computational approaches to explicitating these terms have focused exclusively on in-text solutions, overlooking paratextual apparatus in the footnotes and endnotes employed by professional translators. In this paper, we formalize Genette's (1987) theory of paratexts from literary and translation studies to introduce the task of paratextual explicitation for MT. We construct a dataset of 560 expert-aligned paratexts from four English translations of the classical Chinese short story collection Liaozhai and evaluate LLMs with and without reasoning traces on choice and content of explicitation. Experiments across intrinsic prompting and agentic retrieval methods establish the difficulty of this task, with human evaluation showing that LLM-generated paratexts improve audience comprehension, though remain considerably less effective than translator-authored ones. Beyond model performance, statistical analysis reveals that even professional translators vary widely in their use of paratexts, suggesting that cultural mediation is inherently open-ended rather than prescriptive. Our findings demonstrate the potential of paratextual explicitation in advancing MT beyond linguistic equivalence, with promising extensions to monolingual explanation and personalized adaptation.

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