A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from
  Multi-Way Parallelism
We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and
the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely
created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated
content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it
also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages.
We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is
translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content
being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work
raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large
language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.
65a0a536b1f0788359a997c5
Brian Thompson
65a0a536b1f0788359a997c6
Mehak Preet Dhaliwal
65a0a536b1f0788359a997c7
Peter Frisch
admin_assigned
2024-01-12T10:17:24.437Z
651f7d1523cbf97a80d2fc31
/avatars/63e5101040020f6750c2738c360b5dcf.svg
Peter Frisch
user
pengpengpete
65a0a536b1f0788359a997c8
Tobias Domhan
admin_assigned
2024-01-12T10:17:34.723Z
62cf033426c94b143172184c
/avatars/839ea6d233f92bd83fcf22493bbbc020.svg
Tobias Domhan
user
tdomhan
65a0a536b1f0788359a997c9
Marcello Federico
admin_assigned
2024-01-12T10:17:42.132Z
642555d8daa3502ee3569967
/avatars/679a31005c8e4ef561dfe85786ddafc0.svg
Marcello Federico
user
marcfede
A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from
  Multi-Way Parallelism
We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and
the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely
created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated
content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it
also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages.
We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is
translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content
being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work
raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large
language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web.
Multi-way parallel machine-generated translations dominate web content in lower resource languages, often stemming from low-quality English content, raising concerns for model training.
Machine Translation (MT) multilingual large language models