AI translation of literary texts is "fine", but readers still prefer human translations
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2509. 07829v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Literary translation has recently gained attention as a distinct and complex task in machine translation research, yet translation by small open models remains an open problem, particularly for low-resource languages such as Romanian.
The paper introduces BASSE, a multilingual meta‑evaluation dataset containing 2,040 human‑rated abstractive summaries produced manually or by five LLMs with four prompts. Annotators scored each summary on coherence, consistency, fluency, relevance, and 5W1H using a 5‑point Likert scale. Benchmarking shows proprietary LLM‑judge models best align with human judgments, followed by criteria‑specific automatic metrics, while open‑source judge LLMs perform poorly.
arXiv:2606. 05924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Literary translation poses unique challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated data and the need to balance expression fluency with literary effect.
The paper explores how to improve literary machine translation by using datasets that contain multiple valid translations of the same source text. It introduces a filtering framework that selects source texts whose references show meaningful variation while staying faithful, based on semantic similarity. Experiments show that fine‑tuning on medium to high similarity data outperforms low similarity data, and that using only this filtered subset can match or exceed performance achieved with the full unfiltered set. Additionally, the study compares synthetic translations generated by large language models with human expert translations, finding that fine‑tuning on human expert data yields better results in both automatic metrics and human evaluations, underscoring the continued importance of expert translations for literary MT.
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.
The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.