{"ID":2879255,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16048","arxiv_id":"2508.16048","title":"OpenWHO: A Document-Level Parallel Corpus for Health Translation in Low-Resource Languages","abstract":"In machine translation (MT), health is a high-stakes domain characterised by widespread deployment and domain-specific vocabulary. However, there is a lack of MT evaluation datasets for low-resource languages in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce OpenWHO, a document-level parallel corpus of 2,978 documents and 26,824 sentences from the World Health Organization's e-learning platform. Sourced from expert-authored, professionally translated materials shielded from web-crawling, OpenWHO spans a diverse range of over 20 languages, of which nine are low-resource. Leveraging this new resource, we evaluate modern large language models (LLMs) against traditional MT models. Our findings reveal that LLMs consistently outperform traditional MT models, with Gemini 2.5 Flash achieving a +4.79 ChrF point improvement over NLLB-54B on our low-resource test set. Further, we investigate how LLM context utilisation affects accuracy, finding that the benefits of document-level translation are most pronounced in specialised domains like health. We release the OpenWHO corpus to encourage further research into low-resource MT in the health domain.","short_abstract":"In machine translation (MT), health is a high-stakes domain characterised by widespread deployment and domain-specific vocabulary. However, there is a lack of MT evaluation datasets for low-resource languages in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce OpenWHO, a document-level parallel corpus of 2,978 documents...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16048","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16048v5","authors":"[\"Raphaël Merx\",\"Hanna Suominen\",\"Trevor Cohn\",\"Ekaterina Vylomova\"]","published":"2025-08-22T02:53:56Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\",\"Generative Adversarial Network\"]","has_code":false}