TranslatePsy-AfriSLM is an open‑source machine‑translation resource set for 19 Sub‑Saharan African languages, comprising curated parallel data, African‑specialized synthetic data, and a suite of fine‑tuned small language models (SLMs). The authors demonstrate that a unified quality‑estimation filtering can discard up to 96% of training tokens while preserving quality, and that filtered synthetic data dominates the quality‑efficiency Pareto frontier. Models trained on this curated mixture outperform larger systems such as TranslateGemma‑27B and Qwen3.5‑122B‑A10B, achieving superior performance with as few as 0.8 B parameters.
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.
By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
arXiv:2608. 10812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study reference-free post-training for multilingual machine translation with open large language models.
By Chris Han, Pengzhi Gao, Pei Fu, Jian Luan
arXiv:2606. 03219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: African languages have very little labelled data, and it is unclear if augmenting the quantity of annotation data reliably enhances downstream performance.
By Anuj Tiwari, Oluwapelumi Ogunremu, Terry Oko-odion, Jesujuwon Egbewale, Hannah Nwokocha
arXiv:2608.12018v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at cross-lingual tasks but often fail to capture intra-lingual morphologica...
By Rakib Ullah, Md. Ruhul Islam, Tanbir Ahmed, Nayan Kumar Nath
Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synthetic parallel corpus with approximately 4.
arXiv:2605.28042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art machine translation performance, but they do so as broad generalists largely tra...
By Liu O. Martin, Lucas Bandarkar, Nanyun Peng
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate synthetic data for low‑resource machine translation, focusing on Romansh, which has six distinct varieties. It finds that LLMs are better at translating from Romansh to a high‑resource language (German) than the reverse, creating an asymmetry that makes the direction of data augmentation critical. By generating synthetic translations into German rather than Romansh, the authors surpass a Gemini 3 Pro baseline on German‑Romansh translation, achieving a +23 BLEU improvement in the lowest‑resource variety and producing fluent translations in each Romansh variety according to human evaluation.
By Jannis Vamvas, Ignacio P\'erez Prat, Angela Heldstab, Dominic P. Fischer, Sina Ahmadi, Rico Sennrich
LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.
By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv:2608. 15932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As state-of-the-art machine translation models saturate standard benchmarks, the field needs more challenging evaluations to distinguish between models of varying quality.
By William Kalikman, \v{S}imon Sukup, Michal Te\v{s}nar, Vil\'em Zouhar
arXiv:2509.17930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Multilingual translation suffers from computational redundancy, especially when translating into multiple languages simultaneously. In additi...
By Yiwen Guan, Jacob Whitehill
arXiv:2607. 03836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle on historical manuscripts, a domain that stresses core Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: low-resource transliteration, archaic vocabulary, and noisy input signals.
By Nguyen Kim Hai Bui, Md. Easin Arafat, Tam\'as G\'abor Orosz, Mufti Mahmud