TermJudge: A Document-Level Metric Judging, Not Counting, Terminology in Machine Translation Evaluation

Nicolas Dahan, François Yvon, Rachel Bawden


Abstract
Existing automatic metrics for evaluating terminological use in machine translation (MT) penalise any divergence from a fixed reference, conflating translation errors with the valid terminological variation that human translators routinely produce. We introduce TermJudge, a document-level terminology metric that assigns an interpretable verdict to every term occurrence: glossary-conforming occurrences are settled deterministically, while divergences are assessed under a two-step LLM-as-judge procedure using the full document context: the first detects and labels terminology errors; the second sorts valid document-level variations from inconsistencies. Validated against expert error annotations and document-level human MQM scores, TermJudge ranks first in both system- and segment-level meta-evaluation, ahead of glossary-conformity and quality-estimation baselines. When applied to eight systems translating academic documents, under two prompting conditions, we observe that glossary injection improves terminology translation in all paired comparisons, by removing genuine errors rather than valid variation. TermJudge is released as open-source code.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.6
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:
82–115
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicolas Dahan, François Yvon, and Rachel Bawden. 2026. TermJudge: A Document-Level Metric Judging, Not Counting, Terminology in Machine Translation Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 82–115, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TermJudge: A Document-Level Metric Judging, Not Counting, Terminology in Machine Translation Evaluation (Dahan et al., WMT 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.6.pdf