Benchmarking LLMs for Translating Classical Chinese Poetry:Evaluating Adequacy, Fluency, and Elegance

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in translation tasks. However, the increasing demand for high-quality translations that are not only adequate but also fluent and elegant. To evaluate the extent to which current LLMs can meet these demands, we introduce a suitable benchmark (PoetMT) for translating classical Chinese poetry into English. This task requires not only adequacy in translating culturally and historically significant content but also a strict adherence to linguistic fluency and poetic elegance. To overcome the limitations of traditional evaluation metrics, we propose an automatic evaluation metric based on GPT-4, which better evaluates translation quality in terms of adequacy, fluency, and elegance. Our evaluation study reveals that existing large language models fall short in this task. To evaluate these issues, we propose RAT, a Retrieval-Augmented machine Translation method that enhances the translation process by incorporating knowledge related to classical poetry. Our dataset and code will be made available.