Papers for

translation software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Multilingual corpus improves translation of Indian language dialogues

BaatCheet: A Multilingual Corpus for Dialogue Translation in Indian Languages

Abstract: Existing translation models are typically trained on sentence-level and formal text, limiting their ability to capture everyday conversational dialogue phenomena such as informality, speaker interaction, and discourse coherence. Most existing Indic translation resources and evaluation benchmarks focus on sentence-level or formal text, making it difficult to assess translation quality of the dialogue phenomena. In this work, we introduce BaatCheet, a multilingual dialogue corpus named after the Hindi term for conversation or chitchat, containing approximately 49,000 dialogues for dialogue translation across five translation directions. We fine-tune five open-source LLMs across seven training data configurations and find that fine-tuning yields substantial gains over zero- and few-shot baselines. To comprehensively evaluate dialogue translation quality, we employ multiple evaluation strategies, including automatic metrics, LLM-as-judge, and human assessments using an SQM-guided Direct Assessment (DA) Protocol.

Sun 27 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Translating everyday conversations is harder than translating formal sentences because of informal language and how people talk to each other. The authors created a large collection of dialogues in Indian languages called BaatCheet to help improve translation in these situations. They tested multiple language models that got better when trained on this data, showing it helps translation tools understand casual speech better. They checked the translations with computers and human reviewers to make sure they worked well.
Open → 2609.33296v1

Model improves glossary term use by learning from hard translation mistakes

SalamandraTA at WMT 2026 Terminology Shared Task: Hard Examples Are Better Teachers

Abstract: Terminology-aware translation asks for more than a correct translation: the output must use the exact terms a glossary prescribes. The standard recipe, fine-tuning on glossary-annotated translation pairs, hides an inefficiency: for most examples the glossary prescribes exactly what the model would have produced anyway, so they teach nothing about following a glossary. We therefore keep only the examples where the model's own translation contradicts the glossary. In a controlled study at fixed data volume, this selection alone raises term accuracy from 78.7% to 89.9%. The filtered data, built by a two-way synthetic pipeline on open models, is part of the instruction-tuning mixture of our public release SalamandraTA-7b-instruct v3.0, which, used exactly as released and wrapped in a document-level inference pipeline, forms the BSC submission to the WMT26 Terminology Shared Task Track 1. At the official WMT26 evaluation, our system achieves 94.2% term success at 74.6 chrF++, with only two of the twenty-two submissions outperforming it on both metrics. On last year's benchmark, it also surpasses our GRPO-based system, despite being trained solely with ordinary supervised fine-tuning.

Wed 9 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Getting machine translations that use exact words from a glossary is hard because many training examples don't help the model learn to follow the glossary. The authors found that training only on examples where the model's translation disagrees with the glossary makes the model much better at using the right terms. They used this idea to build a new system that translated with over 94% accuracy on terminology and did very well in an industry-wide competition. This approach helps make sure machines stick to a defined list of terms in translations.
Open → 2609.09999v1

Large language models show political bias when translating recipes

We're Cooked! - Probing LLM Political Alignment Via Conflict-Framed Recipe Translation

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for translation tasks, yet their implicit political positioning in such contexts remains understudied. We ask whether a single politically charged framing term, such as aggressor, enemy, neighbour, or coloniser is sufficient to trigger implicit political alignment in an otherwise apolitical task. We present a fully crossed factorial study in which eight models spanning Western, Chinese, and European origins are prompted to translate culturally attributed recipes into a target language left deliberately unspecified. Across 17 languages, four framing conditions, eight models, and 15,680 responses, we find that models do not simply decline or ask for clarification but resolve the ambiguity. Language resolution and reasoning behavior cluster meaningfully along model families: Western models hedge and deflect with vague justifications, Chinese models resolve conflicts silently, and Mistral Large emerges as a distinct profile combining high compliance with conflict-grounded reasoning. Sensitivity to framing terms is consistent across models: even subtle framing variation is sufficient to modulate behavior. Our findings urge caution when deploying LLMs for translation in conflict-adjacent contexts, where implicit political judgments may be made without any signal to the user.

Mon 7 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) are often used to translate text, but this study shows that even small political hints can influence their translations. The researchers found that different LLMs from around the world respond differently when words with conflict meanings like 'enemy' or 'coloniser' appear in recipe translations. Some models avoid taking a side, some silently pick one, and others combine clear reasoning with compliance. This means that these AI models might make hidden political judgments when translating, without telling users.
Open → 2609.07568v1