MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pretraining Data Translated Across 36 Languages

Maximilian Idahl, Jörg Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andre Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Hajič, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ramírez-Sánchez


Abstract
Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synthetic parallel corpus with approximately 4.8 trillion target-language tokens across 36 European languages, produced by translating 100 billion high-quality Nemotron-CC tokens with Tower+ and OPUS-MT/HPLT-MT systems. For many medium- and lower-resource European languages, this is the largest openly available pre-training resource. On a broad multilingual benchmark suite, reference LLMs trained on MultiSynt/MT reach the final score of HPLT 2.0, a native-data baseline, using roughly 72% fewer pre-training tokens, and outperform it by approximately 15% relative at a matched 100B-token training budget. Our analyses also identify evaluation blind spots: standard multiple-choice benchmarks miss translation-quality differences that a fluency-sensitive LLM-as-judge evaluation cleanly recovers on the trained LLMs (with no fluency deficit in MultiSynt itself), and Norwegian idiomatic and culturally grounded tasks remain better served by native data. We release the corpus, including row-aligned translations from multiple systems, to support controlled research on multilingual pre-training data and evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2185
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
49670–49694
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2185/
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Cite (ACL):
Maximilian Idahl, Jörg Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andre Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Hajič, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, and Gema Ramírez-Sánchez. 2026. MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pretraining Data Translated Across 36 Languages. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 49670–49694, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pretraining Data Translated Across 36 Languages (Idahl et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2185.pdf