Machine-translated texts as an alternative to translated dictionaries for LIWC

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis program developed by James Pennebaker and colleagues. At the basis of LIWC is a dictionary that assigns words to categories. This dictionary is specific to English. Researchers who want to use LIWC on non-English texts have typically relied on translations of the dictionary into the language of the texts. Dictionary translation, however, is a labour-intensive procedure. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach: to use Machine Translation (MT) to translate the texts that must be analysed into English, and then use the English dictionary to analyse the texts. We test several LIWC versions, languages and MT engines, and consistently find the machine-translated text approach performs better than the translated-dictionary approach. We argue that for languages for which effective MT technology is available, there is no need to create new LIWC dictionary translations.