SalamandraTA at WMT 2026 Terminology Shared Task: Hard Examples Are Better Teachers

Xixian Liao, Maite Melero


Abstract
Terminology-aware translation asks for more than a correct translation: the output must use the exact terms a glossary prescribes. The standard recipe, fine-tuning on glossary-annotated translation pairs, hides an inefficiency: for most examples the glossary prescribes exactly what the model would have produced anyway, so they teach nothing about following a glossary. We therefore keep only the examples where the model’s own translation contradicts the glossary. In a controlled study at fixed data volume, this selection alone raises term accuracy from 78.7% to 89.9%. The filtered data, built by a two-way synthetic pipeline on open models, is part of the instruction-tuning mixture of our public release SalamandraTA-7b-instruct v3.0, which, used exactly as released and wrapped in a document-level inference pipeline, forms the BSC submission to the WMT26 Terminology Shared Task Track 1. At the official WMT26 evaluation, our system achieves 94.2% term success at 74.6 chrF++, with only two of the twenty-two submissions outperforming it on both metrics. On last year’s benchmark, it also surpasses our GRPO-based system, despite being trained solely with ordinary supervised fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.116
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venues:
WMT | WS
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1807–1818
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.116/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xixian Liao and Maite Melero. 2026. SalamandraTA at WMT 2026 Terminology Shared Task: Hard Examples Are Better Teachers. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1807–1818, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SalamandraTA at WMT 2026 Terminology Shared Task: Hard Examples Are Better Teachers (Liao & Melero, WMT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.116.pdf