arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

Is MT Ready for the Next Crisis or Pandemic?

The article investigates whether commercial machine translation (MT) tools—Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, GPT, Gemini, and Claude—are ready to support communication during crises or pandemics. Using the TICO-19 dataset, which contains pandemic-related sentences in high-priority low-resource languages, the study evaluates the usability of translations produced by these systems. The goal is to determine how effectively these MT tools can bridge language gaps between governments, aid providers, medical professionals, and affected communities.

By Vipasha Bansal, William D. Lewis, Nicole Mihaylova, Elizabeth Brown, Benjamin Pong
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Multi-SFT: Permissively-Licensed Multilingual Instruction-Following

Multi‑SFT is a new, commercially permissive dataset comprising 502,818 instruction‑response pairs in five European languages, created through translation and regeneration pipelines to address gaps where simple translation is insufficient. Human evaluation shows strong inter‑annotator agreement (≥0.87) across all languages. Fine‑tuning nine models from three families on Multi‑SFT yields performance competitive with larger, proprietary mixes and official instruction‑tuned releases, especially on safety‑related benchmarks.

By Daniela Baiamonte, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Elena Fano, Stefano Simonazzi, Andrea Zugarini
arXiv AI
Oct 5

"I just assumed that it would translate": examining MT risk awareness among healthcare staff with abbreviations as a use case

The study investigates how UK healthcare staff use Google Translate to communicate with patients who speak French or Spanish, focusing on the risks of translating medical abbreviations. Twenty-one staff members from various specialties were interviewed after reviewing translated clinical examples, and the data were analyzed qualitatively to assess awareness of potential safety hazards. The research highlights a gap in understanding how reliance on machine translation might compromise patient care, especially when dealing with abbreviated medical terminology.

By Eleanor Taylor-Stilgoe, F\'elix do Carmo, Constantin Or\u{a}san