@inproceedings{csuros-etal-2026-cross,
    title = "Cross-linguistic Readability and Controllable Difficulty: A Corpus-Based Comparison of Human and {LLM} Translations of Children{'}s Literature in {R}omanian",
    author = "Csuros, Karla  and
      Chitez, Madalina  and
      Rogobete, Roxana",
    editor = "Di Nunzio, Giorgio Maria  and
      Vezzani, Federica  and
      Ermakova, Liana  and
      Azarbonyad, Hosein  and
      Kamps, Jaap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context ({D}e{T}erm{I}t! 2026)",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-evalita/2026.determit-1.1/",
    doi = "10.63317/4yotwqa9fti4",
    pages = "1--11",
    abstract = "Translation can systematically alter text difficulty, particularly when moving into morphologically rich languages. This study examines whether readability-constrained Large Language Models (LLMs) can mitigate difficulty shifts observed in English{--}Romanian translation of children{'}s literature. We construct a paired four-condition corpus comprising English originals, published Romanian translations, readability-constrained LLM translations, and human readability adaptations (12 aligned passages; approx. 23,000 words). Readability is assessed using a Romanian grade-level index (LEMI) designed to be educationally comparable to Flesch{--}Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), the cross-linguistic LIX metric, and morphologically informed measures derived from spaCy. Published Romanian translations are significantly more difficult than their English originals, showing higher LIX scores, grade-level estimates, and increased morphological variation. Readability-constrained LLM translation substantially reduces difficulty relative to the published versions (median delta approx. {\ensuremath{-}}1.46 grade levels), with significant decreases in LIX, morphological feature density, and lexical diversity (MTLD). Human adaptation yields a smaller reduction (median delta approx. {\ensuremath{-}}0.26). Although the direct comparison between LLM and human adaptation is marginal (p = .055, r = 0.64), LLM outputs generally produce larger reductions. These findings demonstrate that translation-induced difficulty shifts are measurable and that controllable LLM translation can modulate readability across structural, lexical, and morphological dimensions in multilingual educational contexts."
}