Towards Style Alignment in Cross-Cultural Translation

Successful communication depends on the speaker's intended style (i.e., what the speaker is trying to convey) aligning with the listener's interpreted style (i.e., what the listener perceives). However, cultural differences often lead to misalignment between the two; for example, politeness is often lost in translation. We characterize the ways that LLMs fail to translate style -biasing translations towards neutrality and performing worse in non-Western languages. We mitigate these failures with RASTA (Retrieval-Augmented STylistic Alignment), a method that leverages learned stylistic concepts to encourage LLM translation to appropriately convey cultural communication norms and align style. 1 * Equal contribution 1 Code, data, & prompts available at https://github. com/shreyahavaldar/style_alignment "After class today, I chatted with Eric, my professor." <Japanese Translation> 今日の授 業の後、私は教授のエリックとお しゃべりしました。