Gaeilge Bhriste ó Shamhlacha Cliste: How Clever Are LLMs When Translating Irish Text?

Teresa Clifford, Abigail Walsh, Brian Davis, Mícheál J. Ó Meachair


Abstract
Large Language Models have been widely adopted in NLP tasks and applications, how- ever, their ability to accurately process Irish and other minority languages has not been fully explored. In this paper we describe prelim- inary experiments examining the capacity of publicly-available machine translation engines (Google Translate, Microsoft Bing, and eTrans- lation) and prompt-based AI systems systems (ChatGPT 3.5, Llama 2) for translating and handling challenging language features of Irish. A hand-crafted selection of challenging Irish language features were incorporated into trans- lation prompts, and the output from each model was examined by a human evaluator. The re- sults of these experiments indicate that these LLM-based models still struggle with translat- ing rare linguistic phenomena and ambiguous constructions. This preliminary analysis helps to inform further research in this field, pro- viding a simple ranking of publicly-available models, and indicating which language features require particular attention when evaluating model capacity.
Anthology ID:
2025.cltw-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Celtic Language Technology Workshop
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi [Virtual Workshop]
Editors:
Brian Davis, Theodorus Fransen, Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, Abigail Walsh
Venues:
CLTW | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
46–51
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.cltw-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Teresa Clifford, Abigail Walsh, Brian Davis, and Mícheál J. Ó Meachair. 2025. Gaeilge Bhriste ó Shamhlacha Cliste: How Clever Are LLMs When Translating Irish Text?. In Proceedings of the 5th Celtic Language Technology Workshop, pages 46–51, Abu Dhabi [Virtual Workshop]. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gaeilge Bhriste ó Shamhlacha Cliste: How Clever Are LLMs When Translating Irish Text? (Clifford et al., CLTW 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.cltw-1.5.pdf