Color Names Across Languages: Salient Colors and Term Translation in Multilingual Color Naming Models

Abstract

Color names facilitate the identification and communication of colors, but may vary across languages. We contribute a set of human color name judgments across 14 common written languages and build probabilistic models that find different sets of nameable (salient) colors across languages. For example, we observe that unlike English and Chinese, Russian and Korean have more than one nameable blue color among fully-saturated RGB colors. In addition, we extend these probabilistic models to translate color terms from one language to another via a shared perceptual color space. We compare Korean-English translations from our model to those from online translation tools and find that our method better preserves perceptual similarity of the colors corresponding to the source and target terms. We conclude with implications for visualization and future research.