LLM-based Machine Translation and Summarization for Latin

AbstractThis 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.