Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages

[2608.27848] Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Computer Science > Sound arXiv:2608.27848 (cs) [Submitted on 28 Aug 2026] Title: Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages Authors: Haopeng Xie , Ismail Rasim Ulgen , Sofia Son , Berrak Sisman , Philipp Koehn View PDF HTML (experimental) 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 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Ismail Rasim Ulgen [ view email ] [v1] Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:36:21 UTC (136 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.SD < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL eess eess.AS References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab) Major funding support from

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