Quantitative Evaluation Approach for Translation of Perceptual Soundscape Attributes: Initial Application to the Thai Language

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantitative evaluation method based on the circumplex model to assess the translation quality of perceptual soundscape attributes, demonstrated through English-Thai translation, addressing challenges of subjectivity and fidelity.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantitative framework for evaluating soundscape attribute translations, improving accuracy over traditional subjective methods.

Findings

Effective assessment of translation quality using the proposed framework.

Successful initial application to English-Thai soundscape attribute translation.

Highlights importance of quantitative methods in perceptual translation evaluation.

Abstract

Translation of perceptual soundscape attributes from one language to another remains a challenging task that requires a high degree of fidelity in both psychoacoustic and psycholinguistic senses across the target population. Due to the inherently subjective nature of human perception, translating soundscape attributes using only small focus group discussion or expert panels could lead to translations with psycholinguistic meanings that, in a non-expert setting, deviate or distort from that of the source language. In this work, we present a quantitative evaluation method based on the circumplex model of soundscape perception to assess the overall translation quality across a set of criteria. As an initial application domain, we demonstrated the use of the quantitative evaluation framework in the context of an English-to-Thai translation of soundscape attributes.