Jiang Li, Tian Lan, Shanshan Wang, Dongxing Zhang, Dianqing Lin, Guanglai Gao, Derek F. Wong, Xiangdong Su. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in machine translation, but still struggle with unseen lowresource languages, especially those written in underrepresented scripts.To investigate whether LLMs can translate such languages with the help of linguistic resources, we introduce Lotus, a benchmark designed to evaluate translation for Mongolian (in traditional script) and Yi.Our study shows that while linguistic resources can improve translation quality as measured by automatic metrics, LLMs remain limited in their ability to handle these languages effectively.We hope our work provides insights for the low-resource NLP community and fosters further progress in machine translation for underrepresented script low-resource languages.Our code and data are available 1 .