Language-free Experience at Expo 2025 Osaka

We implement simultaneous translation capability with the offline direct speech-to-text translation model Canary, using the state-of-the-art policy AlignAtt, and submit it to IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation Shared task for Czech to English and English to German and Italian. The strengths of our system are: (1) high translation quality, outperforming similarly sized baselines both in low- and high-latency regimes in computationally unaware simulations; (2) low computational requirements, as the model has only 1B parameters; (3) multilinguality -- support of 25 source and 25 target languages.

Building on our previous work, this paper develops practical, low-barrier methods for freelance translators and smaller language service providers to evaluate translation technologies using rigorous yet accessible analytic methods. Here we address a high-stakes, specialized need: offline translation for confidentiality-sensitive domains in which privacy constraints preclude the use of cloud-based engines and commercial LLMs. We expand the Reeve Foundation Trilingual Corpus (RFTC) used in our previous work into a multilingual corpus (RFMC) by adding sentence-aligned German and Simplified Chinese reference translations. We then benchmark several locally runnable language models (via Ollama) across four language directions on 1000+ sentences selected from this corpus. We use consistent single-prompt calls without fine-tuning or domain adaptation, comparing local LLM outputs against commercial NMTs (DeepL, Baidu), a frontier LLM (GPT-5.2), and professional-grade local NMT systems (OPUS-CAT, NeuralDesktop, Promt). Automatic evaluation is conducted with MATEO. Results reveal substantial variation in local LLM performance across language directions and model sizes. The best local LLMs match or surpass local NMT systems and a frontier LLM, though they remain behind top commercial NMTs. These findings underscore the viability of carefully selected local LLM translation for privacy-constrained professionals and inform future research on model scaling and multilingual capability.

Multi-agent LLM architectures, such as LangChain and AutoGen, largely assume English as the lingua franca for internal inter-agent communication, even when the end-user task is non-English. We fill this gap by evaluating a two-agent extraction-answer core, with an additional back-translation agent in the English-forced condition, across four typologically diverse languages (Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic; n = 300 per language) using the Aya-23-8B model. We compare a native-language pipeline to an English-forced one (which incorporates a final back-translation step from English to the user's language). We discover a statistically significant English-Forcing Tax (surviving a strict Bonferroni correction) that isolates the cost of English routing from general multi-agent orchestration overhead. Forcing inter-agent communication through English reduces Exact Match accuracy by 13.0 percentage points (Spanish) up to 30.6 percentage points (Hindi) compared to native-language multi-agent execution. Using chrF scores as a diagnostic measure of English-reference lexical overlap, we find that lower overlap is strongly associated with pipeline failure, consistent with translation loss being an important contributor to the observed performance drop. These findings suggest a compelling case for native-language routing in agent frameworks when the source and target languages are typologically distant, reducing a compounding translation tax.