@inproceedings{jiao-sun-2026-shijing,
    title = "From Shijing to {E}nglish and {G}erman: Resources and Evaluation for {LLM} Translation of Early {C}hinese Poetry",
    author = "Jiao, Ying  and
      Sun, Meng",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.542/",
    pages = "11143--11162",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "While large language models (LLMs) show promise in literary translation, Shijing (The Book of Songs) serves as a rigorous yet under-explored testbed for testing their limits, given its linguistic antiquity and complex poetic constraints. Automated evaluation in this domain is currently hindered by a scarcity of multilingual resources and the inadequacy of existing metrics in capturing both semantic fidelity and aesthetic quality. In this paper, we bridge these gaps by curating a Shijing parallel corpus with line-by-line Chinese-English-German alignments, together with a fine-grained lexical knowledge base (KB) for archaic expressions. Based on these resources, we propose a hybrid evaluation framework that integrates knowledge-driven, rule-based, and LLM-as-judge metrics. Experimental results show that our framework achieves significantly higher human correlation than traditional metrics and demonstrates high statistical stability. By applying this framework to evaluate representative LLMs, we reveal that while top-tier models like Gemini-2.5-Pro and DeepSeek-3.1 show potential, achieving semantic precision and aesthetic sophistication{---}particularly in lower-resource directions like German{---}remains a persistent challenge. Our code, lexical KB, and corpus reconstruction protocols are available at https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/ShijingLLMTrans."
}