An Analysis of Affective Words in Machine Translation

Overview To our knowledge, no-one has analysed the choice of affective word choices in a machine translation (MT) system, that is, an MT system that pays attention to the translation of words connoting some kind of affective state. “Affective states” include emotions, feelings, and moods. We are working on the analysis of affective translation in statistical machine translation (SMT) systems, in particular for translation from Spanish to English. In this paper we report on the following: availability of suitable bilingual/multilingual corpora, availability of suitable English affect seed words, manual translation of the English affect seed words into Spanish, translation of a development set of about 2,000 English sentences (each sentence contains at least one affective word) into Spanish and the evaluation of the translation on (a subset of) the development set focused on affect words.