# Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08146 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08146/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tamarian, a fictional language introduced in the Star Trek episode Darmok, communicates meaning through utterances of metaphorical references, such as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" instead of "We should work together." This work assembles a Tamarian-English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels, and uses this to construct a parallel corpus of 456 English-Tamarian utterances. A machine translation system based on a large language model (T5) is trained using this parallel corpus, and is shown to produce an accuracy of 76% when translating from English to Tamarian on known utterances.