@inproceedings{polakova-etal-2026-challenges,
    title = "Challenges in Machine Translation of Interactive Multimodal Exercises",
    author = "Polakova, Lucie  and
      Hrabal, Miroslav  and
      Kloudov{\'a}, V{\v{e}}ra  and
      Nov{\'a}k, Michal  and
      Anisimova, Mariia  and
      Popel, Martin",
    editor = "Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Alhafni, Bashar  and
      Bann{\`o}, Stefano  and
      Bexte, Marie  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Tack, Anais  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of {NLP} for Building Educational Applications ({BEA} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.bea-1.11/",
    pages = "141--152",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-409-5",
    abstract = "This paper describes linguistic and technological challenges encountered within an applied project aimed at expanding a large e-learning portal from its original Czech to three other languages: Ukrainian, English and German. Although there seems to be a general belief that machine translation is a solved task in 2026, we show that translating educational content, which in our case is highly terminological, multimodal, interactive and encoded in XML, brings along many challenges of different types, some easily solvable and some not. We also compare our results from the early phase of the project (Transformer-based machine translation) with those after the switch to the LLM-based translation methods. We show that both MT methods are prone to different types of errors, some of which are quite new (such as the undesired correction of counterfactual statements) and require new ways of handling them. The resulting four-language edition of the educational web portal will be freely available to educators, students and researchers by the end of 2026."
}