When Metrics Reward the Worst Translations: Internalizing Cultural Reasoning for Social Media Translation Evaluation
Automatic translation quality metrics trained on general-domain corpora systematically fail on social media content, where communicative intent is encoded in culturally loaded expressions (internet slang, homophonic ciphers, and platform-specific idioms) rather than surface token patterns. We conduct a systematic empirical analysis demonstrating that standard metrics including COMET, XCOMET, and BERTScore exhibit near-zero or negative correlation with human cultural judgments, and even display a severity inversion in which scores increase as translation quality deteriorates. We further show that this failure extends to large language model judges: Qwen3-235B achieves Cohen's kappa of only...
| Authors | Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Dingming Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 September 2026 |
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