!Translate : When You Cannot Cook Up a Translation, Explain

In the domain of cuisine, both dishes and in- gredients tend to be heavily rooted in the local context they belong to. As a result, the asso- ciated terms are often realia tied to specific cultures and languages. This causes difficulties for non-speakers of the local language and ma- chine translation (MT) systems alike, as it im- plies a lack of the concept and/or of a plausible translation. MT typically opts for one of two alternatives: keeping the source language terms untranslated or relying on a hyperonym/near- synonym in the target language, provided one exists. !Translate proposes a better alterna- tive: explaining. Given a cuisine entry such as a restaurant menu item, we identify culture- specific terms and enrich the output of the MT system with automatically retrieved definitions of the non-translatable terms in the target lan- guage, making the translation more actionable for the final user.