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Large Language Models (LLMs) are being tested as a cost‑effective alternative to human judgment for evaluating machine translation (MT). This study compares LLM agreement with human annotators on two MT quality schemes—Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA)—across 70 language pairs and public WMT23/25 data. Results show that while LLMs sometimes match or exceed human agreement, performance varies widely by scheme, language, and domain, and remains unreliable in many settings. The work also identifies specific challenges for both humans (e.g., fine‑grained MQM, low‑resource languages) and LLMs (e.g., minor errors, wrong language variants, span annotation).
arXiv:2610.33741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based evaluators have rapidly become a standard tool for machine translation evaluation, yet the design choices that shape their behavior remain po...
The paper investigates gender bias in machine translation evaluation metrics using an occupation-balanced subset of GAMBIT+ across seven English‑source language pairs, including a new German extension. It finds that masculine translations tend to receive higher scores and that biases align with stereotypical gender representations, though the strength varies by evaluator and language. The study highlights that assessing bias requires multiple dimensions beyond a single aggregate measure.
arXiv:2607. 20241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms.
EviSI is an evidence‑based evaluation agent for low‑latency simultaneous speech‑to‑speech translation. It combines Multidimensional Quality Metrics with interpreter‑developed criteria, using shared source evidence to assess four dimensions—Anchor, Event, Logic, and Fluency—while deduplicating verified errors before scoring. On English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English data, EviSI’s rankings correlate strongly with human judgments, outperforming BLEU and COMET, and its multilingual extension maintains these correlations across five language directions.
arXiv:2608. 08283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although large language models can translate some historical languages surprisingly well, their usefulness in digital humanities workflows is limited by the lack of reliable evaluation.