Towards Reliable Machine Translation: Scaling LLMs for Critical Error Detection and Safety

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chopra, Muskaan, Sparrenberg, Lorenz, Sifa, Rafet
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Chopra, Muskaan
Sparrenberg, Lorenz
Sifa, Rafet
author_facet Chopra, Muskaan
Sparrenberg, Lorenz
Sifa, Rafet
contents Machine Translation (MT) plays a pivotal role in cross-lingual information access, public policy communication, and equitable knowledge dissemination. However, critical meaning errors, such as factual distortions, intent reversals, or biased translations, can undermine the reliability, fairness, and safety of multilingual systems. In this work, we explore the capacity of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect such critical errors, evaluating models across a range of parameters using the publicly accessible data sets. Our findings show that model scaling and adaptation strategies (zero-shot, few-shot, fine-tuning) yield consistent improvements, outperforming encoder-only baselines like XLM-R and ModernBERT. We argue that improving critical error detection in MT contributes to safer, more trustworthy, and socially accountable information systems by reducing the risk of disinformation, miscommunication, and linguistic harm, especially in high-stakes or underrepresented contexts. This work positions error detection not merely as a technical challenge, but as a necessary safeguard in the pursuit of just and responsible multilingual AI. The code will be made available at GitHub.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_11444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Reliable Machine Translation: Scaling LLMs for Critical Error Detection and Safety
Chopra, Muskaan
Sparrenberg, Lorenz
Sifa, Rafet
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Translation (MT) plays a pivotal role in cross-lingual information access, public policy communication, and equitable knowledge dissemination. However, critical meaning errors, such as factual distortions, intent reversals, or biased translations, can undermine the reliability, fairness, and safety of multilingual systems. In this work, we explore the capacity of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect such critical errors, evaluating models across a range of parameters using the publicly accessible data sets. Our findings show that model scaling and adaptation strategies (zero-shot, few-shot, fine-tuning) yield consistent improvements, outperforming encoder-only baselines like XLM-R and ModernBERT. We argue that improving critical error detection in MT contributes to safer, more trustworthy, and socially accountable information systems by reducing the risk of disinformation, miscommunication, and linguistic harm, especially in high-stakes or underrepresented contexts. This work positions error detection not merely as a technical challenge, but as a necessary safeguard in the pursuit of just and responsible multilingual AI. The code will be made available at GitHub.
title Towards Reliable Machine Translation: Scaling LLMs for Critical Error Detection and Safety
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11444