Bringing Ladin to FLORES+

Samuel Frontull, Thomas Ströhle, Carlo Zoli, Werner Pescosta, Ulrike Frenademez, Matteo Ruggeri, Daria Valentin, Karin Comploj, Gabriel Perathoner, Silvia Liotto, Paolo Anvidalfarei


Abstract
Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have opened new possibilities for developing translation systems also for smaller, so-called low-resource, languages. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has further revolutionized machine translation by enabling more flexible and context-aware generation. However, many challenges remain for low-resource languages, and the availability of high-quality, validated test data is essential to support meaningful development, evaluation, and comparison of translation systems. In this work, we present an extension of the FLORES+ dataset for two Ladin variants, Val Badia and Gherdëina, as a submission to the Open Language Data Initiative Shared Task 2025. To complement existing resources, we additionally release two parallel datasets for Gherdëina–Val Badia and Gherdëina–Italian. We validate these datasets by evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs and NMT systems on this test data, both with and without leveraging the newly released parallel data for fine-tuning and prompting. The results highlight the considerable potential for improving translation quality in Ladin, while also underscoring the need for further research and resource development, for which this contribution provides a basis.
Anthology ID:
2025.wmt-1.81
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:
1061–1071
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.81/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Samuel Frontull, Thomas Ströhle, Carlo Zoli, Werner Pescosta, Ulrike Frenademez, Matteo Ruggeri, Daria Valentin, Karin Comploj, Gabriel Perathoner, Silvia Liotto, and Paolo Anvidalfarei. 2025. Bringing Ladin to FLORES+. In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1061–1071, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bringing Ladin to FLORES+ (Frontull et al., WMT 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.wmt-1.81.pdf