@InProceedings{huang-tsai:2026:wmt,
  author    = {Huang, Zheng-Yu  and  Tsai, Richard Tzong-Han},
  title     = {Evaluating Pragmatic Appropriateness in English–Vietnamese Machine Translation with Dyadic Profiles},
  booktitle      = {Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation},
  month          = {October},
  year           = {2026},
  address        = {Budapest, Hungary},
  publisher      = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {276--287},
  abstract  = {English workplace requests often omit relationship information needed for pragmatically appropriate Vietnamese person reference and politeness. We evaluate translations generated with and without explicit sender--recipient profiles for 30 requests using two large language models (LLMs), Gemini 3.5 Flash and SEA-LION, with judgments from two native speakers of Vietnamese. Two native speakers of Vietnamese judged whether translations were correct and natural and whether they suited the displayed relationship. Adding profiles produced no statistically detectable overall improvement in appropriateness; translations generated without profiles already received high ratings. In a prespecified role-reversal evaluation, the same translations were judged first under their intended hierarchical relationships and later under reversed relationships. All 20 Gemini translations generated with profiles were judged appropriate under the intended relationship, compared with four after reversal; SEA-LION's result was inconclusive. A post-hoc side-by-side comparison also favored Gemini's translations generated with profiles but found no detectable SEA-LION preference. These results suggest that when most translations receive positive yes/no ratings, role reversal and direct comparison can reveal differences those ratings alone miss. Fixed evaluation order and reuse of the annotators in the follow-up limit causal interpretation.},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-1.16}
}