Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages
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Computer Science > Sound
Title:Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages
Abstract:Prosody plays an important role in speech translation, conveying information such as emphasis, emotion, and intent beyond lexical content. However, despite recent progress in expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), little is known about how prosodic patterns are similar/different across languages. Understanding these cross-lingual similarities and differences is crucial for effectively incorporating prosody into expressive S2ST systems. In this work, we present the first fine-grained cross-lingual analysis of prosody using multilingual dubbing data across English-German, English-Spanish, and English-French language pairs. We analyze the similarity of pitch, energy, and temporal feature patterns between source and target speech and investigate the linguistic and alignment-related factors affecting this similarity. Our analysis reveals inherent cross-lingual correlations in prosodic structure between certain languages. The findings provide important insights into the transferability of prosody across languages and offer empirical guidance for future expressive speech-to-speech translation systems.
| Comments: | Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Findings |
| Subjects: | Sound (cs.SD); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.27848 [cs.SD] |
| (or arXiv:2608.27848v1 [cs.SD] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27848
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Ismail Rasim Ulgen [view email][v1] Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:36:21 UTC (136 KB)
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