A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism; Arxiv, 2024

Brian Thompson,∗ 1 Mehak Preet Dhaliwal,† 2 Peter Frisch,1 Tobias Domhan,3 Marcello Federico1 1AWS AI Labs 2UC Santa Barbara 3Amazon

brianjt@amazon.com, Arxiv ; A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism

"Abstract

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 qual- ity 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."