Cultivar: A Contrastive and Locale-Oriented Translation Benchmark for Investigating Contamination and Localisation Robustness

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09766v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:56:43 GMT
• Title: Cultivar: A Contrastive and Locale-Oriented Translation Benchmark for Investigating Contamination and Localisation Robustness
• Abstract summary: We advocate for source-contrastive evaluation and instantiate it with Cultivar, a localised subset of FLORES.<n>We benchmark 32 open-weight models and find that MT-specialised models are less robust, a few models potentially overfit FLORES, and models tend to translate US content better than that of other locales.
• Score: 16.354905551585844
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Multilingual translation benchmarks are typically sourced in English and translated into other languages, treating language pairs as the unit of evaluation---a design that is prone to contamination over time and overlooks locale and cultural considerations. We therefore advocate for source-contrastive evaluation and instantiate it with Cultivar, a localised subset of FLORES, which enables locale-specific translation evaluation. When paired with unlocalised counterparts, performance discrepancy allows the probing of data contamination and localisation robustness. We benchmark 32 open-weight models and find that MT-specialised models are less robust, a few models potentially overfit FLORES, and models tend to translate US content better than that of other locales, regardless of language.

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