Japanese-English Machine Translation of Recipe Texts

Concomitant with the globalization of food culture, demand for the recipes of specialty dishes has been increasing. The recent growth in recipe sharing websites and food blogs has resulted in numerous recipe texts being available for diverse foods in various languages. However, little work has been done on machine translation of recipe texts. In this paper, we address the task of translating recipes and investigate the advantages and disadvantages of traditional phrasebased statistical machine translation and more recent neural machine translation. Specifically, we translate Japanese recipes into English, analyze errors in the translated recipes, and discuss available room for improvements.