Long to reign over us: A Case Study of Machine Translation and a New Monarch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Novel terminology and changes in terminology are often a challenge for machine translation systems.The passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III provide a striking example of translation shift in the real world, particularly in translation contexts that have ambiguity.Examining translation between French and English, we present a focused case-study of translations about King Charles III as produced both by publicly-available MT systems and by a neural machine translation system trained specifically on Canadian parliamentary text.We find that even in cases where human translators would have adequate context to disambiguate terms from the source language, machine translation systems do not always produce the expected output.Where we are able to analyze the training data, we note that this may represent artifacts in the data, raising important questions about machine translation updates in light of real world events.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".