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Measuring the Cost of Variety Conflation in Multilingual MT Evaluation: Adding Mozambican Xichangana, Nyanja and Sena to FLORES+

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

In this paper, we extend FLORES+ with Portuguese-source evaluation sets for three Mozambican Bantu varieties: Xichangana, Mozambican Nyanja, and Sena. We compare Xichangana with the existing Tsonga reference and Mozambican Nyanja with Chichewa, and evaluate NLLB-200, Google Translate, GPT, and a variant-aware NLLB model. Holding system output fixed reveals substantial reference sensitivity. On \textit{devtest}, changing only the reference from Tsonga to Xichangana reduces spBLEU by 13.10 points for NLLB-200 and 15.30 for Google. On matched Nyanja subsets, replacing Chichewa with Mozambican Nya

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First collected: 2026-09-20T12:41:04.663Z. This is not the publication date.