"I’m Sorry, I Can’t Translate That": A Challenge Set for Refusal to Translate, Overgeneration and Hallucination in LLM Translation Systems

Lisa Vasileva


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly raised the bar for translation quality in the recent years. However, they are still prone to novel failure modes, including hallucinations and overgenerations, where the generated translation is partially or fully detached from the source text and contains information that is not present in the input. To facilitate the analysis of these behaviors and assess the robustness of LLM-based translation systems, we introduce a challenge set specifically designed to probe scenarios that we have observed to be particularly prone to overgeneration, hallucination, and other forms of semantic detachment from the source. We describe the construction of the challenge set and present the evaluation of the systems submitted to the WMT 2026 General Machine Translation shared task.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.92
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:
1594–1601
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.92/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lisa Vasileva. 2026. "I’m Sorry, I Can’t Translate That": A Challenge Set for Refusal to Translate, Overgeneration and Hallucination in LLM Translation Systems. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1594–1601, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“I’m Sorry, I Can’t Translate That”: A Challenge Set for Refusal to Translate, Overgeneration and Hallucination in LLM Translation Systems (Vasileva, WMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.92.pdf