Garry Kuwanto, E. Urua, Priscilla Amuok, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Anuoluwapo Aremu, V. Otiende, Loice Emma Nanyanga, T. Nyoike, A. D. Akpan, Nsima Ab Udouboh, Idongesit Udeme Archibong, Idara Effiong Moses, Ifeoluwatayo A. Ige, Benjamin Ayoade Ajibade, Olumide Benjamin Awokoya, Idris Abdulmumin, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, R. Iro, I. Ahmad, Deontae Smith, Praise-EL Michaels, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Anietie U Andy

International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Paper

Abstract

Low-resource languages often face challenges in acquiring high-quality language data due to the reliance on translation-based methods, which can introduce the translationese effect. This phenomenon results in translated sentences that lack fluency and naturalness in the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for data collection by leveraging storyboards to elicit more fluent and natural sentences. Our method involves presenting native speakers with visual stimuli in the form of storyboards and collecting their descriptions without direct exposure to the source text. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing our storyboard-based approach with traditional text translation-based methods in terms of accuracy and fluency. Human annotators and quantitative metrics were used to assess translation quality. The results indicate a preference for text translation in terms of accuracy, while our method demonstrates worse accuracy but better fluency in the language focused.