Up to Par? MT Systems Take a Shot at Sports Terminology

Einar Sigurdsson, Magnús Magnússon, Atli Jasonarson, Steinthor Steingrimsson


Abstract
We present a submission to the WMT25 test suite subtask, focusing on the capabilities of MT systems to translate sports-related language. Although many sports attract extensive media attention and feature a rich, polysemous language, often shaped by active neologism and community-driven translations, the sports domain has received relatively little focus in MT research. In English-Icelandic automatic translations, sports-specific vocabulary often appears to be mistranslated. Our test suite is designed to test whether this observation holds merit. We evaluate 34 systems, both automatically and manually, and find that sports language poses challenges to a varying degree for all the systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.wmt-1.60
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
856–865
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.60/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Einar Sigurdsson, Magnús Magnússon, Atli Jasonarson, and Steinthor Steingrimsson. 2025. Up to Par? MT Systems Take a Shot at Sports Terminology. In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 856–865, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Up to Par? MT Systems Take a Shot at Sports Terminology (Sigurdsson et al., WMT 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.60.pdf