Translating Classical Poetry into Modern Prose
For researchers in literary translation and low-resource language processing, this dataset and evaluation highlight the limitations of current LLMs and MT evaluation methods for poetic translation.
The paper introduces Padyam2Gadyam, a dataset for translating 13th-17th Century Telugu Classical Poetry into modern Telugu and English prose, and evaluates 5 LLMs on this task, finding that performance leaves large room for improvement in both languages.
We introduce Padyam2Gadyam, a dataset for the task of poem-to-prose translation from 13th-17th Century Telugu Classical Poetry to contemporary Telugu and English prose. The dataset consists of 600 poems and their human-verified Telugu and English prose translations. We evaluated 5 contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to do poem-to-prose translation into Telugu and English. Our results indicate that while there are differences across LLMs, their overall performance leave a large room for improvement in both languages. Through qualitative analysis, we discuss the the capabilities and limitations of contemporary MT evaluation approaches for this task.