Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idiom Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Khan, Muhammad Farmal, Akter, Mousumi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Khan, Muhammad Farmal
Akter, Mousumi
author_facet Khan, Muhammad Farmal
Akter, Mousumi
contents Idiomatic translation remains a significant challenge in machine translation, especially for low resource languages such as Urdu, and has received limited prior attention. To advance research in this area, we introduce the first evaluation datasets for Urdu to English idiomatic translation, covering both Native Urdu and Roman Urdu scripts and annotated with gold-standard English equivalents. We evaluate multiple open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems on this task, focusing on their ability to preserve idiomatic and cultural meaning. Automatic metrics including BLEU, BERTScore, COMET, and XCOMET are used to assess translation quality. Our findings indicate that prompt engineering enhances idiomatic translation compared to direct translation, though performance differences among prompt types are relatively minor. Moreover, cross script comparisons reveal that text representation substantially affects translation quality, with Native Urdu inputs producing more accurate idiomatic translations than Roman Urdu.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idiom Translation
Khan, Muhammad Farmal
Akter, Mousumi
Computation and Language
Idiomatic translation remains a significant challenge in machine translation, especially for low resource languages such as Urdu, and has received limited prior attention. To advance research in this area, we introduce the first evaluation datasets for Urdu to English idiomatic translation, covering both Native Urdu and Roman Urdu scripts and annotated with gold-standard English equivalents. We evaluate multiple open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems on this task, focusing on their ability to preserve idiomatic and cultural meaning. Automatic metrics including BLEU, BERTScore, COMET, and XCOMET are used to assess translation quality. Our findings indicate that prompt engineering enhances idiomatic translation compared to direct translation, though performance differences among prompt types are relatively minor. Moreover, cross script comparisons reveal that text representation substantially affects translation quality, with Native Urdu inputs producing more accurate idiomatic translations than Roman Urdu.
title Evaluating Large Language Models on Urdu Idiom Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17460