@inproceedings{ploeger-etal-2025-cross,
    title = "A Cross-Lingual Perspective on Neural Machine Translation Difficulty",
    author = {Ploeger, Esther  and
      Bjerva, Johannes  and
      Tiedemann, J{\"o}rg  and
      Oestling, Robert},
    editor = "Haddow, Barry  and
      Kocmi, Tom  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Monz, Christof",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.21/",
    pages = "340--354",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-341-8",
    abstract = "Intuitively, machine translation (MT) between closely related languages, such as Swedish and Danish, is easier than MT between more distant pairs, such as Finnish and Danish. Yet, the notions of `closely related' languages and `easier' translation have so far remained underspecified. Moreover, in the context of neural MT, this assumption was almost exclusively evaluated in scenarios where English was either the source or target language, leaving a broader cross-lingual view unexplored. In this work, we present a controlled study of language similarity and neural MT difficulty for 56 European translation directions. We test a range of language similarity metrics, some of which are reasonable predictors of MT difficulty. On a text-level, we reassess previously introduced indicators of MT difficulty, and find that they are not well-suited to our domain, or neural MT more generally. Ultimately, we hope that this work inspires further cross-lingual investigations of neural MT difficulty"
}