Sign language translation remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of large-scale, sentence-aligned datasets. Prior arts have focused on various feature extraction and architectural changes to support neural machine translation for sign languages. We propose POSESTITCH-SLT, a novel pre-training scheme that is inspired by linguistic-templates-based sentence generation technique. With translation comparison on two sign language datasets, How2Sign and iSign, we show that a simple transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture outperforms the prior art when considering template-generated sentence pairs in training. We achieve BLEU-4 score improvements from 1.97 to 4.56 on How2Sign and from 0.55 to 3.43 on iSign, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods for pose-based gloss-free translation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of template-driven synthetic supervision in low-resource sign language settings.

The critical lack of structured terminological data for South Africa's official languages hampers progress in multilingual NLP, despite the existence of numerous government and academic terminology lists. These valuable assets remain fragmented and locked in non-machine-readable formats, rendering them unusable for computational research and development. Mafoko addresses this challenge by systematically aggregating, cleaning, and standardising these scattered resources into open, interoperable datasets. We introduce the foundational Mafoko dataset, released under the equitable, Africa-centered NOODL framework. To demonstrate its immediate utility, we integrate the terminology into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. Experiments show substantial improvements in the accuracy and domain-specific consistency of English-to-Tshivenda machine translation for large language models. Mafoko provides a scalable foundation for developing robust and equitable NLP technologies, ensuring South Africa's rich linguistic diversity is represented in the digital age.

LLMs often require adaptation to domain-specific requirements, a process that can be expensive when relying solely on SFT. We present an empirical study on applying CPO to simulate a post-editing workflow for data-efficient domain adaptation. Our approach synthesizes preference pairs by treating the base model's own raw output as the 'rejected' translation and the human-approved TM entry as the 'chosen' one. This method provides direct feedback on the model's current knowledge, guiding it to align with domain-specific standards. Experiments in English-Brazilian Portuguese and English-Korean show that, by using just 14.7k preference pairs, the model achieves performance close to that of a model trained on 160k+ samples with SFT, demonstrating significant data efficiency. Although we showcase its effectiveness in MT, this application of CPO naturally generalizes to other generative tasks where a model's initial drafts can serve as a contrastive signal against a golden reference.

This paper presents Awal, a community-powered initiative for developing language technology resources for Tamazight. We provide a comprehensive review of the NLP landscape for Tamazight, examining recent progress in computational resources, and the emergence of community-driven approaches to address persistent data scarcity. Launched in 2024, awaldigital.org platform addresses the underrepresentation of Tamazight in digital spaces through a collaborative platform enabling speakers to contribute translation and voice data. We analyze 18 months of community engagement, revealing significant barriers to participation including limited confidence in written Tamazight and ongoing standardization challenges. Despite widespread positive reception, actual data contribution remained concentrated among linguists and activists. The modest scale of community contributions -- 6,421 translation pairs and 3 hours of speech data -- highlights the limitations of applying standard crowdsourcing approaches to languages with complex sociolinguistic contexts. We are working on improved open-source MT models using the collected data.

In the absence of sizable training data for most world languages and NLP tasks, translation-based strategies such as translate-test -- evaluating on noisy source language data translated from the target language -- and translate-train -- training on noisy target language data translated from the source language -- have been established as competitive approaches for cross-lingual transfer (XLT). For token classification tasks, these strategies require label projection: mapping the labels from each token in the original sentence to its counterpart(s) in the translation. To this end, it is common to leverage multilingual word aligners (WAs) derived from encoder language models such as mBERT or LaBSE. Despite obvious associations between machine translation (MT) and WA, research on extracting alignments with MT models is largely limited to exploiting cross-attention in encoder-decoder architectures, yielding poor WA results. In this work, in contrast, we propose TransAlign, a novel word aligner that utilizes the encoder of a massively multilingual MT model. We show that TransAlign not only achieves strong WA performance but substantially outperforms popular WA and state-of-the-art non-WA-based label projection methods in MT-based XLT for token classification.

The URIEL+ linguistic knowledge base supports multilingual research by encoding languages through geographic, genetic, and typological vectors. However, data sparsity remains prevalent, in the form of missing feature types, incomplete language entries, and limited genealogical coverage. This limits the usefulness of URIEL+ in cross-lingual transfer, particularly for supporting low-resource languages. To address this sparsity, this paper extends URIEL+ with three contributions: introducing script vectors to represent writing system properties for 7,488 languages, integrating Glottolog to add 18,710 additional languages, and expanding lineage imputation for 26,449 languages by propagating typological and script features across genealogies. These additions reduce feature sparsity by 14% for script vectors, increase language coverage by up to 19,015 languages (1,007%), and improve imputation quality metrics by up to 33%. Our benchmark on cross-lingual transfer tasks (oriented around low-resource languages) shows occasionally divergent performance compared to URIEL+, with performance gains up to 6% in certain setups. Our advances make URIEL+ more complete and inclusive for multilingual research.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has redefined Machine Translation (MT), enabling context-aware and fluent translations across hundreds of languages and textual domains. Despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs often exhibit uneven performance across language families and specialized domains. Moreover, recent evidence reveals that these models can encode and amplify different biases present in their training data, posing serious concerns for fairness, especially in low-resource languages. To address these gaps, we introduce Translation Tangles, a unified framework and dataset for evaluating the translation quality and fairness of open-source LLMs. Our approach benchmarks 24 bidirectional language pairs across multiple domains using different metrics. We further propose a hybrid bias detection pipeline that integrates rule-based heuristics, semantic similarity filtering, and LLM-based validation. We also introduce a high-quality, bias-annotated dataset based on human evaluations of 1,439 translation-reference pairs. The code and dataset are accessible on GitHub: https://github.com/faiyazabdullah/TranslationTangles

This paper presents the winning submission of the RaaVa team to the AmericasNLP 2025 Shared Task 3 on Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Machine Translation (MT) into Indigenous Languages of America, where our system ranked first overall based on average Pearson correlation with the human annotations. We introduce Feature-Union Scorer (FUSE) for Evaluation, FUSE integrates Ridge regression and Gradient Boosting to model translation quality. In addition to FUSE, we explore five alternative approaches leveraging different combinations of linguistic similarity features and learning paradigms. FUSE Score highlights the effectiveness of combining lexical, phonetic, semantic, and fuzzy token similarity with learning-based modeling to improve MT evaluation for morphologically rich and low-resource languages. MT into Indigenous languages poses unique challenges due to polysynthesis, complex morphology, and non-standardized orthography. Conventional automatic metrics such as BLEU, TER, and ChrF often fail to capture deeper aspects like semantic adequacy and fluency. Our proposed framework, formerly referred to as FUSE, incorporates multilingual sentence embeddings and phonological encodings to better align with human evaluation. We train supervised models on human-annotated development sets and evaluate held-out test data. Results show that FUSE consistently achieves higher Pearson and Spearman correlations with human judgments, offering a robust and linguistically informed solution for MT evaluation in low-resource settings.

Machine Translation (MT) is widely employed to address resource scarcity in low-resource languages by generating synthetic data from high-resource counterparts. While sentiment preservation in translation has long been studied, a critical but underexplored factor is the role of cultural alignment between source and target languages. In this paper, we hypothesize that semantic labels are drifted or altered during MT due to cultural divergence. Through a series of experiments across culturally sensitive and neutral domains, we establish three key findings: (1) MT systems, including modern Large Language Models (LLMs), induce label drift during translation, particularly in culturally sensitive domains; (2) unlike earlier statistical MT tools, LLMs encode cultural knowledge, and leveraging this knowledge can amplify label drift; and (3) cultural similarity or dissimilarity between source and target languages is a crucial determinant of label preservation. Our findings highlight that neglecting cultural factors in MT not only undermines label fidelity but also risks misinterpretation and cultural conflict in downstream applications.

The use of language models for automatically evaluating long-form text (LLM-as-a-judge) is becoming increasingly common, yet most LLM judges are optimized exclusively for English, with strategies for enhancing their multilingual evaluation capabilities remaining largely unexplored in the current literature. This has created a disparity in the quality of automatic evaluation methods for non-English languages, ultimately hindering the development of models with better multilingual capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce M-Prometheus, a suite of open-weight LLM judges ranging from 3B to 14B parameters that can provide both direct assessment and pairwise comparison feedback on multilingual outputs. M-Prometheus models outperform state-of-the-art open LLM judges on multilingual reward benchmarks spanning more than 20 languages, as well as on literary machine translation (MT) evaluation covering 4 language pairs. Furthermore, M-Prometheus models can be leveraged at decoding time to significantly improve generated outputs across all 3 tested languages, showcasing their utility for the development of better multilingual models. Lastly, through extensive ablations, we identify the key factors for obtaining an effective multilingual judge, including backbone model selection and training on synthetic multilingual feedback data instead of translated data. We release our models, training dataset, and code.