Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese

Zilong Li, Jie Cao


Abstract
Ancient people translated classical Chinese into Japanese using a system of annotations placed around characters. We abstract this process as sequence tagging tasks and fit them into modern language technologies. The research on this annotation and translation system faces a low resource problem. We alleviate this problem by introducing an LLM-based annotation pipeline and constructing a new dataset from digitized open-source translation data. We show that in the low-resource setting, introducing auxiliary Chinese NLP tasks enhances the training of sequence tagging tasks. We also evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on this task. While they achieve high scores on direct machine translation, our method could serve as a supplement to LLMs to improve the quality of character’s annotation.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.285
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6031–6045
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.285/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zilong Li and Jie Cao. 2026. Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6031–6045, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese (Li & Cao, EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.285.pdf