Translation Asymmetry in LLMs as a Data Augmentation Factor: A Case Study for 6 Romansh Language Varieties
Recent strategies for low-resource machine translation rely on LLMs to generate synthetic data based on text in higher-resource languages. We revisit this idea for Romansh, a language with 6 distinct varieties. LLMs tend to confuse these varieties when translating into Romansh, but they are quite good at translating out of Romansh into a high-resource language such as German. Due to this asymmetry, the direction of data augmentation is a crucial choice. We find that contrary to recent strategies, creating synthetic translations into the higher-resource language is the superior approach, and only this approach allows us to surpass a Gemini 3 Pro baseline on German-Romansh translation (+23 ...
| Authors | Jannis Vamvas, Ignacio Pérez Prat, Angela Heldstab et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
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