Nils Rehlinger
2026
A Fine-Grained Linguistic Evaluation of Low-Resource Luxembourgish–English MT
Nils Rehlinger
Proceedings for the Ninth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT 2026)
Nils Rehlinger
Proceedings for the Ninth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT 2026)
Machine translation (MT) evaluation is central in guiding researchers on how to improve a model’s performance. Current automatic evaluation practices fail to provide reliable insights into the specific translation errors that occur, especially for low-resource languages. This paper introduces the Lux-MT-Test-Suite, enabling a linguistically motivated and fine-grained analysis of Luxembourgish–English (LB-EN) MT based on 896 test items covering 12 linguistic categories and 36 linguistic phenomena. We compare a baseline local LLM (Gemma 3), its fine-tuned counterpart (LuxMT), and a proprietary state-of-the-art LLM (GPT-5) to analyse what local LLMs learn through fine-tuning in a low-resource setting and to assess performance differences between local and proprietary systems. The findings identify specific performance gains through fine-tuning, minor degradations, a difference in translation strategies, performance gaps between local and proprietary models, and remaining challenges.