arXiv Computation and Language

Last Translation Benchmark

The paper introduces the Last Translation Benchmark (LTB), a live dataset of human-authored and peer‑reviewed examples—including texts, images, audio, and videos—that are designed to break current state‑of‑the‑art machine translation models. Each example is accompanied by handcrafted verification rules that specify concrete failure cases, providing a reliable and actionable evaluation method. The benchmark aims to overcome the limitations of existing automatic metrics and gold human evaluations, which often lack reproducibility, objectivity, and scalability.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

TranslatePsy-AfriSLM: High-Quality Data Scaling For Low-Resource Machine Translation

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 family of fine‑tuned small language models (SLMs). The authors demonstrate that a unified quality‑estimation filtering can remove up to 96% of training tokens without harming quality, and that filtered synthetic data dominates the quality‑efficiency Pareto frontier. Models trained on this mixture outperform much larger systems such as TranslateGemma‑27B and Qwen3.5‑122B‑A10B, achieving superior performance with as few as 0.8 B parameters.

By Milan Gritta, Patrik Lambert, Jihye Back, Amril Nazir
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Is Human Annotation Necessary? Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection in Machine Translation

The paper introduces Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection (ESD) in machine translation, a self‑evolution framework that replaces human annotations with pseudo‑labels generated by a large language model. By iteratively applying Minimum Bayes Risk decoding, the method produces high‑quality error spans without costly human effort. Experiments on WMT Metrics Shared Task datasets show that models trained solely on these pseudo‑labels outperform both unadapted baselines and supervised models trained on human data at system and span levels, while keeping sentence‑level performance competitive.

By Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Zhi Qu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Beyond "To whom it may concern": Tailoring Machine Translation to Audience and Intent

The paper investigates how machine translation can be tailored to specific audiences and intents, a capability enabled by large language models (LLMs). By systematically evaluating purpose-driven MT across 50 languages, 5 model sizes, and 8 text domains, the authors find that explicit instructions significantly improve translation adaptiveness, especially for informal domains, larger models, and higher-resource languages. They also show that traditional MT metrics often penalize adapted translations and that models can self-generate useful instructions from context, closing a large portion of the adaptiveness gap.

By Raphael Merx, Ekaterina Vylomova, Trevor Cohn