Bernhard Stadler
2026
Diagnosing Translated Benchmarks: An Automated Quality Assurance Study of the EU20 Benchmark Suite
Klaudia Thellmann | Bernhard Stadler | Michael Färber
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Klaudia Thellmann | Bernhard Stadler | Michael Färber
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Machine-translated benchmark datasets reduce costs and offer scale, but noise, loss of structure, and uneven quality weaken confidence. What matters is not merely whether we can translate, but also whether we can measure and verify translation reliability at scale. We study translation quality in the EU20 benchmark suite, which comprises five established benchmarks translated into 20 languages, via a three-step automated quality assurance approach: (i) a structural corpus audit with targeted fixes; (ii) quality profiling using a neural metric (COMET, reference-free and reference-based) with translation service comparisons (DeepL / ChatGPT / Google); and (iii) an LLM-based span-level translation error landscape. Trends are consistent: datasets with lower COMET scores exhibit a higher share of accuracy/mistranslation errors at span level (notably HellaSwag; ARC is comparatively clean). Reference-based COMET on MMLU against human-edited samples points in the same direction. We release cleaned/corrected versions of the EU20 datasets, and code for reproducibility. In sum, automated quality assurance offers practical, scalable indicators that help prioritize review – complementing, not replacing, human gold standards.
Quantifying the Impact of Translation Errors on Multilingual LLM Evaluation
Klaudia Thellmann | Bernhard Stadler | Michael Färber | Jens Lehmann
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Klaudia Thellmann | Bernhard Stadler | Michael Färber | Jens Lehmann
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Machine-translated benchmarks are widely used to assess the multilingual capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet translation errors in these benchmarks remain underexplored, raising concerns about the reliability and comparability of multilingual evaluation. We address two practical gaps: (i) how well automatic MQM-style error spans from LLM judges and a span-aware QE baseline (xCOMET-XXL) match expert human span annotations on benchmark translations, and (ii) how strongly translation errors (as opposed to source-side issues in the English original) explain accuracy drops on translated benchmarks. We find that span agreement is non-trivial on naturally occurring benchmark translations, and that target-side translation errors are consistently associated with measurable, percentage-point drops in translated accuracy even after controlling for English correctness and source-side anomalies.