title: A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from
    Multi-Way Parallelism
summary: 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 quality 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.
paper_authors._id: 65a0a536b1f0788359a997c5
paper_authors.name: Brian Thompson
paper_authors._id: 65a0a536b1f0788359a997c6
paper_authors.name: Mehak Preet Dhaliwal
paper_authors._id: 65a0a536b1f0788359a997c7
paper_authors.name: Peter Frisch
paper_authors.status: admin_assigned
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2024-01-12T10:17:24.437Z
paper_authors._id: 651f7d1523cbf97a80d2fc31
paper_authors.avatarUrl: /avatars/63e5101040020f6750c2738c360b5dcf.svg
paper_authors.fullname: Peter Frisch
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: pengpengpete
paper_authors._id: 65a0a536b1f0788359a997c8
paper_authors.name: Tobias Domhan
paper_authors.status: admin_assigned
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2024-01-12T10:17:34.723Z
paper_authors._id: 62cf033426c94b143172184c
paper_authors.avatarUrl: /avatars/839ea6d233f92bd83fcf22493bbbc020.svg
paper_authors.fullname: Tobias Domhan
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: tdomhan
paper_authors._id: 65a0a536b1f0788359a997c9
paper_authors.name: Marcello Federico
paper_authors.status: admin_assigned
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2024-01-12T10:17:42.132Z
paper_authors._id: 642555d8daa3502ee3569967
paper_authors.avatarUrl: /avatars/679a31005c8e4ef561dfe85786ddafc0.svg
paper_authors.fullname: Marcello Federico
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: marcfede
paper_title: A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from
    Multi-Way Parallelism
paper_summary: 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 quality 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.
paper_ai_keywords: Machine Translation (MT) multilingual large language models