Arabic to Romanian Machine Translation: A Case Study on Distant Language Pairs

Ioan Alexandru Hirica, Stefana Arina Tabusca, Sergiu Nisioi


Abstract
This paper investigates machine translation between two linguistically distant languages, Arabic and Romanian, with a focus on translating from Arabic to Romanian. Dataset cleaning techniques are addressed, offering insights on the impact of translation for a language pair with limited resources. Using publicly available corpora (e.g., OPUS) and manually translated diplomatic texts, filtering methods are applied, such as duplicate removal, embedding similarity analysis (LEALLA), and Large Language Model (LLM)-based validation (Gemini-flash-002). Transformer models are trained and evaluated with diverse preprocessing pipelines that incorporate subword tokenization. Additionally, the performance of a fine-tuned LLM is assessed for this task and is compared to their pre-trained counterparts. Despite computational limitations, the results emphasize the importance of targeted preprocessing and model adaptation in improving Arabic-Romanian translation quality.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
423–432
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.51/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ioan Alexandru Hirica, Stefana Arina Tabusca, and Sergiu Nisioi. 2025. Arabic to Romanian Machine Translation: A Case Study on Distant Language Pairs. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 423–432, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Arabic to Romanian Machine Translation: A Case Study on Distant Language Pairs (Hirica et al., RANLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.51.pdf