Today’s MT digest highlights research aimed at making translation and multilingual knowledge access more dependable in specialized, high-stakes settings. Across scientific, literary, and interactive workflows, the papers explore how post-editing support, domain-sensitive systems, and conversational retrieval can better align outputs with human intent and discourse nuance. A second shared theme is trustworthiness, with several works emphasizing stronger evaluation and hallucination-resistant question answering to improve usability for researchers and professional translators.

Enhancing Scientific Discourse: Machine Translation for the Scientific Domain

The increasing volume of scientific research necessitates effective communication across language barriers. Machine translation (MT) offers a promising solution for accessing international publications. However, the scientific domain presents unique challenges due to its specialized vocabulary and complex sentence structures. In this paper, we present the development of a collection of parallel and monolingual corpora for the scientific domain. The corpora target the language pairs Spanish-English, French-English, and Portuguese-English. For each language pair, we create a large general scientific corpus as well as four smaller corpora focused on the domains of: Cancer Research, Energy Research, Neuroscience, and Transportation research. To evaluate the quality of these corpora, we utilize them for fine-tuning general-purpose neural machine translation (NMT) systems. We provide details regarding the corpus creation process, the fine-tuning strategies employed, and we conclude with the evaluation results.

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

Metaphors in Literary Post-Editing: Opening Pandora's Box?

This paper investigates how post-editors of literary texts react and respond to the way metaphors have been translated by Neu ral Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs). The results show that one in three metaphors in the output were changed by the post-editors, demonstrating that the translation of fig urative language is indeed problematic in literary MT (LitMT). The responses indi cate that the post-editors were aware of overly literal translations, though mostly for multiword expressions. Moreover, at times they found it difficult to determine whether solutions were acceptable. They rated the overall quality of the MT out put as quite poor and stated that the post editing was more work and more effort than it would have been translating from scratch. This supports previous studies ar guing that post-editing constrains transla tors in their creativity and diminishes their sense of text ownership.

MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks

Accurate evaluation of conversational retrieval is pivotal for advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. However, existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. To address these challenges, we introduce MTR-Suite, a unified framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking retrieval. It features: (1) MTR-Eval, an LLM-based auditor quantifying alignment gaps in previous benchmarks; (2) MTR-Pipeline, a multi-agent system using greedy traversal clustering to generate high-fidelity dialogues at 1/400th human cost; and (3) MTR-Bench, a rigorous general-domain benchmark. MTR-Bench mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity), offering superior discriminative power. We make our code and data publicly available to facilitate future research at https://github.com/rangehow/mtr-suite.

ACL-Verbatim: hallucination-free question answering for research

Academic researchers need efficient and reliable methods for collecting high-quality information from trusted sources, but modern tools for AI-assisted research still suffer from the tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce factually inaccurate or nonsensical output, commonly referred to as hallucinations. We apply the extractive question answering system VerbatimRAG to research papers in the ACL Anthology, directly mapping user queries to verbatim text spans in retrieved documents. We contribute a novel ground truth dataset for the task of mapping user queries to relevant text spans in research papers, and use it to train and evaluate a variety of extractive models. Human annotation is performed by NLP researchers and is based on synthetic user queries generated using a custom pipeline based on the ScIRGen methodology, paired with chunks of research papers retrieved by VerbatimRAG. On this benchmark, a 150M-parameter ModernBERT token classifier trained on silver supervision from our pipeline achieves the best word-level F1 (53.6), ahead of the strongest evaluated LLM extractor (48.7).