Translating Domain-Specific Terminology in Typologically-Diverse Languages: A Study in Tax and Financial Education

AbstractDomain-specific multilingual terminology is essential for accurate machine translation (MT) and cross-lingual NLP applications. We present a gold-standard terminology resource for the tax and financial education domains, built from curated governmental publications and covering seven typologically diverse languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Haitian Creole. Using this resource, we assess various MT systems and LLMs on translation quality and term accuracy. We annotate over 3,000 terms for domain-specificity, facilitating a comparison between domain-specific and general term translations, and observe models’ challenges with specialized tax terms. We also analyze the case of terminology-aided translation, and the LLMs’ performance in extracting the translated term given the context. Our results highlight model limitations and the value of high-quality terminologies for advancing MT research in specialized contexts.