Multiway Parallel Corpus in Forced Migration Domain for Multilingual Machine Translation

Fatemeh Azadi, Samuel Larkin, Chi-kiu Lo


Abstract
High-quality domain-specific parallel corpora play a significant role in improving the performance of machine translation (MT) and multilingual natural language processing (NLP) systems in a target domain. However, most existing multilingual parallel corpora focus on general-purpose data, and a majority of highly specialized domains such as forced migration are suffering from lack of multilingual data. In this work, we present a new high-quality 4-way parallel corpus in the forced migration domain. The corpus consists of human-translated journal articles from Forced Migration Review in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Our corpus contains data aligned at both document and sentence level in four languages and provides a clean and reliable 4-way parallel resource for multilingual research in forced migration. Using this dataset, we benchmark several open-weight large language models (LLMs), an open-weight multilingual MT system, online closed MT systems, and a closed LLM across 12 translation directions. We further leverage our corpus to improve the MT quality of a top-performing multilingual foundation model with two common domain adaptation approaches, fine-tuning and few-shot prompting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our corpus in improving the translation performance of current models in the forced migration domain.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.384
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
4889–4901
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-384
DOI:
10.63317/3gxsf4vr3pjb
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fatemeh Azadi, Samuel Larkin, and Chi-kiu Lo. 2026. Multiway Parallel Corpus in Forced Migration Domain for Multilingual Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4889–4901, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Multiway Parallel Corpus in Forced Migration Domain for Multilingual Machine Translation (Azadi et al., LREC 2026)
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