SalamandraTA at WMT 2026 Terminology Shared Task: Hard Examples Are Better Teachers

Extra context is valuable for simultaneous speech translation of technical talks, but injecting the entire document context into every streaming segment is often too coarse. Through diagnostic experiments, we find that context gains mainly come from paper-specific terminology recovery rather than uniform semantic enhancement. We therefore propose EGTA, an Evidence-Grounded Terminology Adaptation framework that builds a document terminology memory, selects compact candidate terms conditioned on the current streaming state, and adapts ASR/speech-side and decoder-side decision spaces using only the selected terms. EGTA can be instantiated in cascaded, end-to-end, and generation-only SimulST settings without full-model fine-tuning. We evaluate EGTA on an ACL technical-talk SimulST evaluation suite consisting of MCIF-dev and ACL60/60-dev. On MCIF-dev, EGTA-RG improves BLEU by +1.05/+0.59, XCOMET-XL by +0.019/+0.006, named-entity recall by +79%/+73% relative, and acronym recall by +0.099/+0.171 on En$\rightarrow$Zh and En$\rightarrow$De. Across MCIF-dev latency settings, EGTA consistently improves XCOMET-XL, named-entity recall, and acronym recall. External validation on ACL60/60-dev further shows consistent terminology-recall gains without additional fine-tuning. Shuffled-memory controls and activation audits provide evidence that the improvements are tied to paper-specific evidence alignment rather than generic context prompting.

Modern translation workflows demand more than semantic equivalence. Users routinely require models to preserve JSON or HTML schemas, honor curated glossaries, disambiguate with provided context, and match prescribed registers, often several at once. Conventional metrics such as BLEU and xCOMET capture semantic fidelity but provide little signal on constraint adherence, while general instruction following benchmarks ignore the cross-lingual nature of translation. We introduce \bench, a benchmark for multilingual translation instruction following covering seven languages, with 4,506 single-constraint and 2,838 multi-constraint items spanning six constraint dimensions and five compositional patterns with instructions issued in all seven languages. Constraints are split into a gating subset verified by deterministic checkers and a continuous subset scored by a rubric-based LLM judge, combined under a multiplicative rule that resists reward hacking. Evaluating 15 models reveals systematic gaps that prior protocols miss: Instruction following scales with size more sharply than translation quality, glossary and structured-format constraints dominate the difficulty gradient, and general instruction following rankings correlate only weakly with translation behavior. Our benchmark are available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hy-MT2/tree/main/IFMTBench.

For scientific progress, we need benchmarks that test the limits of state-of-the-art models, and evaluation methods that inform us about failure cases. As models get stronger, standard benchmarks for machine translation are approaching saturation. Further, automatic translation metrics are unreliable, vulnerable to reward-hacking, and provide unactionable assessments. Even gold human evaluation is not problem-free, because it often lacks reproducibility, objectivity, and scalability. Overall, this prevents us from tracking objective progress in the field and identifying pathways for improvement. We introduce the Last Translation Benchmark, a collection of human-authored and peer-reviewed examples (texts, images, audio, videos) that break leading machine translation models. We also present a new evaluation approach: each example comes with handcrafted verification rules describing concrete failure cases on that example, therefore allowing reliable and actionable future evaluation. The Last Translation Benchmark is a live dataset that accepts ongoing contributions. The latest version is LTBv1, containing accepted contributions prior to September 1st 2026, with future releases planned as new data is continuously collected.