@inproceedings{volk-etal-2024-llm,
    title = "{LLM}-based Machine Translation and Summarization for {L}atin",
    author = {Volk, Martin  and
      Fischer, Dominic Philipp  and
      Fischer, Lukas  and
      Scheurer, Patricia  and
      Str{\"o}bel, Phillip Benjamin},
    editor = "Sprugnoli, Rachele  and
      Passarotti, Marco",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lt4hala-1.15",
    pages = "122--128",
    abstract = "This paper presents an evaluation of machine translation for Latin. We tested multilingual Large Language Models, in particular GPT-4, on letters from the 16th century that are in Latin and Early New High German. Our experiments include translation and cross-language summarization for the two historical languages into modern English and German. We show that LLM-based translation for Latin is clearly superior to previous approaches. We also show that LLM-based paraphrasing of Latin paragraphs from the historical letters produces English and German summaries that are close to human summaries published in the edition.",
}

This paper presents an evaluation of machine translation for Latin. We tested multilingual Large Language Models, in particular GPT-4, on letters from the 16th century that are in Latin and Early New High German. Our experiments include translation and cross-language summarization for the two historical languages into modern English and German. We show that LLM-based translation for Latin is clearly superior to previous approaches. We also show that LLM-based paraphrasing of Latin paragraphs from the historical letters produces English and German summaries that are close to human summaries published in the edition.
Volk, Martin Fischer, Dominic Philipp Fischer, Lukas Scheurer, Patricia Str{\"o}bel, Phillip Benjamin
LLM-based Machine Translation and Summarization for Latin