Findings of the WMT 2026 Shared Task on Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Language Translation

Sahinur Rahman Laskar, Firoj Alam, Bishwaraj Paul, Irfan Ahmad, Maya Silvi Lydia, Pankaj Dadure


Abstract
We present the findings of the WMT 2026, which evaluated bidirectional translation between Arabic and English, Hindi, Bangla, Indonesian, and Urdu. We release AraAsian1.0, a news-domain parallel corpus with 20.1K-21.0K training pairs per language pair, and evaluate submissions on ten translation directions using BLEU, ChrF2, TER, COMET, and BERT-based metrics. Of 23 registered teams, 13 submitted systems, producing 70 primary and 65 contrastive runs. Fine-tuned multilingual MT models remained the strongest overall: MADLAD-based systems won four primary directions, while target-aware pivoting, joint multilingual adaptation, and MBR-based ensembling led the remaining tracks. The best contrastive run exceeded the best primary run in only three of ten directions, and each gain was below 0.2 BLEU, indicating that additional data, prompting, or multi-pass refinement did not provide consistent improvements. Bangla had the lowest winning BLEU in both directions, despite comparable training-set size. BLEU and COMET selected the same winner in nine of ten primary results but only six of ten contrastive results, with the largest disagreements occurring for LLM-based and reranked outputs. These results emphasize domain-matched adaptation, target-aware transfer, and multi-metric reporting in low-resource Arabic-Asian translation. We made the AraAsian1.0 dataset available for the community.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.54
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:
1117–1130
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.54/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sahinur Rahman Laskar, Firoj Alam, Bishwaraj Paul, Irfan Ahmad, Maya Silvi Lydia, and Pankaj Dadure. 2026. Findings of the WMT 2026 Shared Task on Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Language Translation. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1117–1130, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Findings of the WMT 2026 Shared Task on Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Language Translation (Laskar et al., WMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.54.pdf