Dominic P. Fischer
2025
Name Consistency in LLM-based Machine Translation of Historical Texts
Dominic P. Fischer
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Martin Volk
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at translating 16th-century letters from Latin and Early New High German to modern English and German. While they perform well at translating well-known historical city names (e.g., Lutetia –> Paris), their ability to handle person names (e.g., Theodor Bibliander) or lesser-known toponyms (e.g., Augusta Vindelicorum –> Augsburg) remains unclear. This study investigates LLM-based translations of person and place names across various frequency bands in a corpus of 16th-century letters. Our results show that LLMs struggle with person names, achieving accuracies around 60%, but perform better with place names, reaching accuracies around 90%. We further demonstrate that including a translation suggestion for the proper noun in the prompt substantially boosts accuracy, yielding highly reliable results.
2024
LLM-based Translation Across 500 Years. The Case for Early New High German
Martin Volk
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Dominic P. Fischer
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Patricia Scheurer
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Raphael Schwitter
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Phillip B. Ströbel
Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2024)