Translation Analytics for Freelancers II: Benchmarking Local LLMs for Confidential Translation Workflows

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Hauptverfasser: Balashov, Yuri, VanHorn, Rex, Xu, Mingxi, Downes, Austin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Balashov, Yuri
VanHorn, Rex
Xu, Mingxi
Downes, Austin
author_facet Balashov, Yuri
VanHorn, Rex
Xu, Mingxi
Downes, Austin
contents Building on our previous work, this paper develops practical, low-barrier methods for freelance translators and smaller language service providers to evaluate translation technologies using rigorous yet accessible analytic methods. Here we address a high-stakes, specialized need: offline translation for confidentiality-sensitive domains in which privacy constraints preclude the use of cloud-based engines and commercial LLMs. We expand the Reeve Foundation Trilingual Corpus (RFTC) used in our previous work into a multilingual corpus (RFMC) by adding sentence-aligned German and Simplified Chinese reference translations. We then benchmark several locally runnable language models (via Ollama) across four language directions on 1000+ sentences selected from this corpus. We use consistent single-prompt calls without fine-tuning or domain adaptation, comparing local LLM outputs against commercial NMTs (DeepL, Baidu), a frontier LLM (GPT-5.2), and professional-grade local NMT systems (OPUS-CAT, NeuralDesktop, Promt). Automatic evaluation is conducted with MATEO. Results reveal substantial variation in local LLM performance across language directions and model sizes. The best local LLMs match or surpass local NMT systems and a frontier LLM, though they remain behind top commercial NMTs. These findings underscore the viability of carefully selected local LLM translation for privacy-constrained professionals and inform future research on model scaling and multilingual capability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Translation Analytics for Freelancers II: Benchmarking Local LLMs for Confidential Translation Workflows
Balashov, Yuri
VanHorn, Rex
Xu, Mingxi
Downes, Austin
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Building on our previous work, this paper develops practical, low-barrier methods for freelance translators and smaller language service providers to evaluate translation technologies using rigorous yet accessible analytic methods. Here we address a high-stakes, specialized need: offline translation for confidentiality-sensitive domains in which privacy constraints preclude the use of cloud-based engines and commercial LLMs. We expand the Reeve Foundation Trilingual Corpus (RFTC) used in our previous work into a multilingual corpus (RFMC) by adding sentence-aligned German and Simplified Chinese reference translations. We then benchmark several locally runnable language models (via Ollama) across four language directions on 1000+ sentences selected from this corpus. We use consistent single-prompt calls without fine-tuning or domain adaptation, comparing local LLM outputs against commercial NMTs (DeepL, Baidu), a frontier LLM (GPT-5.2), and professional-grade local NMT systems (OPUS-CAT, NeuralDesktop, Promt). Automatic evaluation is conducted with MATEO. Results reveal substantial variation in local LLM performance across language directions and model sizes. The best local LLMs match or surpass local NMT systems and a frontier LLM, though they remain behind top commercial NMTs. These findings underscore the viability of carefully selected local LLM translation for privacy-constrained professionals and inform future research on model scaling and multilingual capability.
title Translation Analytics for Freelancers II: Benchmarking Local LLMs for Confidential Translation Workflows
topic Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31452