Creativity Bias: How Machine Evaluation Struggles with Creativity in Literary Translations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Gerrits, Kyo, van Noord, Rik, Arenas, Ana Guerberof
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Gerrits, Kyo
van Noord, Rik
Arenas, Ana Guerberof
author_facet Gerrits, Kyo
van Noord, Rik
Arenas, Ana Guerberof
contents This article investigates the performance of automatic evaluation metrics (AEMs) and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation on literary translation across multiple languages, genres, and translation modalities. The aim is to assess how well these tools align with professionals when evaluating translation, creativity (creative shifts & errors), and see if they can substitute laborious manual annotations. A dataset of literary translations across three modalities (human translation, machine translation, and post-editing), three genres and three language pairs was created and annotated in detail for creativity by experienced professional literary translators. The results show that both AEMs and LLM-as-a-judge evaluations correlate poorly with professional evaluations on creativity, with LLM-as-a-judge showing a systematic bias in favour of machine-translated texts and penalising creative and culturally appropriate solutions. Moreover, performance is consistently worse for more literary genres such as poetry. This highlights fundamental limitations of current automatic evaluation tools for literary translation and the need to create new tools that do not frequently consider out of routine translations as errors.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Creativity Bias: How Machine Evaluation Struggles with Creativity in Literary Translations
Gerrits, Kyo
van Noord, Rik
Arenas, Ana Guerberof
Computation and Language
This article investigates the performance of automatic evaluation metrics (AEMs) and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation on literary translation across multiple languages, genres, and translation modalities. The aim is to assess how well these tools align with professionals when evaluating translation, creativity (creative shifts & errors), and see if they can substitute laborious manual annotations. A dataset of literary translations across three modalities (human translation, machine translation, and post-editing), three genres and three language pairs was created and annotated in detail for creativity by experienced professional literary translators. The results show that both AEMs and LLM-as-a-judge evaluations correlate poorly with professional evaluations on creativity, with LLM-as-a-judge showing a systematic bias in favour of machine-translated texts and penalising creative and culturally appropriate solutions. Moreover, performance is consistently worse for more literary genres such as poetry. This highlights fundamental limitations of current automatic evaluation tools for literary translation and the need to create new tools that do not frequently consider out of routine translations as errors.
title Creativity Bias: How Machine Evaluation Struggles with Creativity in Literary Translations
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13596