localization engineers

Abstract: Existing datasets on cultural knowledge have been typically created by human annotators familiar with each culture. However, the process requires considerable human effort, presenting a significant challenge to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce WikiOriginQA, a QA dataset automatically constructed by objectively representing the origins of knowledge through the creation dates of different Wikipedia language editions. Experimental results with the created dataset confirm that LLM performance tends to be biased toward Anglophone cultures. Furthermore, the results suggest the importance of knowledge propagation into the Anglosphere. These findings demonstrate the validity of our automated approach, enabling cultural bias evaluations with superior scalability across diverse languages without extensive manual annotation.

Abstract: Internet texts are replete with format tags that carry structural, semantic, and functional meaning. Current large language model (LLM)-based translation systems struggle to balance translation fluency with tag fidelity when processing tagged text. We argue that resolving this tension requires a systematic approach at three interconnected levels: data synthesis, capability building, and multi-objective alignment. At the data level, we identify and formalize a fundamental trade-off between structural tag diversity and translation naturalness in synthetic data generation; existing methods optimize for one at the expense of the other. We propose a hybrid synthesis strategy (Hy-LST) combining LLM-based synthesis tag method and Two-Stage LLM-based synthesis tag method to produce both diverse and natural tagged data. At the capability level, we decompose tag-aware translation into four sub-tasks of increasing difficulty in a multi-task supervised fine-tuning framework, enabling targeted capability acquisition and knowledge transfer. At the alignment level, we design three complementary reward functions under a group relative policy optimization framework, each targeting a distinct objective (fluency, tag fidelity, and tag-scoped translation quality), and show that joint optimization consistently outperforms single-reward alternatives. Experiments on six language directions (en2zh, en2ja, en2de, en2fr, en2ru, de2fr) demonstrate that each level contributes measurable improvements, and the complete system significantly outperforms existing methods. Qualitative analysis reveals specific error patterns and their mitigation after training with our method.

Abstract: Low-resource multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) systems have expanded language coverage, but their robustness under complex text inputs remains insufficiently diagnosed. Existing evaluations mainly focus on naturalness, speaker similarity, and content consistency using regular test sentences, while providing limited insight into how multilingual TTS systems fail when handling challenging inputs such as numbers, dates, named entities, long sentences, code-switched expressions, and punctuation-related structures. This paper proposes a complex-text robustness diagnosis framework for low-resource multilingual TTS. We evaluate robustness from three dimensions: content consistency, language consistency, and generation stability. A multilingual robustness testing scheme is designed for Thai, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Indonesian, covering ordinary sentences and multiple types of complex text inputs. We further introduce automatic diagnostic metrics, including character error rate, language identification accuracy, and duration abnormal rate. To support input-level risk analysis before speech generation, we propose a lightweight Text Risk Score (TRS), which estimates synthesis risk from interpretable text features without manual annotation or model training. Experiments on three representative multilingual TTS systems, including OmniVoice, VoxCPM2, and MMS-TTS, show that complex text inputs expose systematic failure patterns that are not fully reflected by ordinary short-sentence evaluation. Different systems exhibit distinct vulnerabilities in number normalization, named entity handling, long-text generation, and code-switched input processing. Furthermore, TRS shows a positive correlation with content errors and duration abnormalities, demonstrating its usefulness as a low-cost pre-synthesis indicator for complex-text risk diagnosis in low-resource multilingual TTS.