Research in cross-lingual modeling for historical and extremely low-resource languages is hindered by the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks. To address this, we present ManCC—the first task-anchored benchmark for Manchu–Classical Chinese translation. ManCC consists of a high-quality parallel corpus of 16,627 sentence pairs, derived from the Qing-dynasty historical text Manwen Laodang-Taizong, and a reproducible evaluation protocol that combines automatic metrics (BLEU and chrF) with a three-dimensional human assessment (fidelity, fluency, linguistic normativity). Through systematic evaluation across three model families (non-pretrained, multilingual pretrained, and large language models), we find that linguistic differences significantly influence performance, broader language coverage in multilingual pretraining facilitates low-resource transfer, and automatic metrics often fail to capture essential errors in historical translation—underscoring the necessity of human evaluation. ManCC not only provides foundational resources for Manchu–Classical Chinese translation but also establishes a diagnosable, reproducible platform for cross-lingual modeling of historical low-resource languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in role-playing dialogues, yet they often struggle to maintain emotionally consistent and psychologically plausible character personalities. We present MECoT (Markov Emotional Chain-of-Thought), a framework that enhances LLMs’ ability to generate authentic personality-driven dialogues through stochastic emotional transitions. Inspired by dual-process theory, MECoT combines a Markov-chain-driven emotional processor for intuitive responses with an LLM-based reasoning mechanism for rational regulation, mapped onto a 12-dimensional Emotion Circumplex Model. The framework dynamically adjusts emotional transitions using personality-weighted matrices and historical context, ensuring both emotional coherence and character consistency. We introduce the Role-playing And Personality Dialogue (RAPD) dataset, featuring diverse character interactions with fine-grained emotional annotations, along with novel metrics for evaluating emotional authenticity and personality alignment. Experimental results demonstrate MECoT’s effectiveness, achieving 93.3% emotional accuracy on RAPD and substantially outperforming existing approaches. Our analysis reveals optimal emotional granularity (12-16 categories) and validates our data-driven personality optimization approach. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MECoT