Evaluating Terminology Translation Methods

Théo Salmenkivi-Friberg, Iikka Hauhio, Tommi Nieminen


Abstract
We present an evaluation of several state-of-the-art machine translation systems supporting terminology constraints in the English–Finnish translation direction. We first perform a meta-evaluation, in which we critically evaluate the evaluation metrics we use, including the questions asked from human evaluators and the automatic evaluation methods. We find that common metrics such as term accuracy and TERm do not agree with the human evaluators’ judgement on the correctness of the terms, while LLM-as-a-judge shows promise even though it does not agree with the human evaluators on all questions. We then compare the evaluated systems based on the human evaluation results, LLM-as-a-judge, COMET, and chrF2. We find that of the systems considered, soft constraint methods, including a term-trained model and an LLM, perform better than hard constraints forced using a constrained beam search.
Anthology ID:
2026.eamt-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Tilburg, The Netherlands
Editors:
Dimitar Shterionov, Eva Vanmassenhove, Mirella De Sisto, Fred Blain, Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami, Lisa Lepp, Chiara Manna, Argentina Anna Rescigno, Alina Karakanta, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Manuel Lardelli, Natalia Resende, Elena Murgolo, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Anna Zaretskaya, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Dagmar Gromann, Rachel Bawden, Barry Haddow, Sara Szoc, Mikel Forcada, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
432–458
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.28/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Théo Salmenkivi-Friberg, Iikka Hauhio, and Tommi Nieminen. 2026. Evaluating Terminology Translation Methods. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 432–458, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Terminology Translation Methods (Salmenkivi-Friberg et al., EAMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.28.pdf