# Mutarjim: Advancing Bidirectional Arabic-English Translation with a Small Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10668/) (2021)
- [Tower: An Open Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17733/) (2024)
- [In-context Examples Selection for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02437/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04675/) (2023)
- [Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09102/) (2022)
- [Aya 23: Open Weight Releases to Further Multilingual Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15032/) (2024)
- [A Paradigm Shift in Machine Translation: Boosting Translation Performance of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11674/) (2023)
- [WMT24++: Expanding the Language Coverage of WMT24 to 55 Languages & Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12404/) (2025)
- [AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12053/) (2023)
- [AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12068/) (2021)
- [BigTranslate: Augmenting Large Language Models with Multilingual Translation Capability over 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18098/) (2023)
- [ALLaM: Large Language Models for Arabic and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15390/) (2024)
- [LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05975/) (2024)
- [Exploring Human-Like Translation Strategy with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04118/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02481/) (2025)
- [X-ALMA: Plug & Play Modules and Adaptive Rejection for Quality Translation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03115/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06575/) (2023)
- [TURJUMAN: A Public Toolkit for Neural Arabic Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03933/) (2022)
- [Kuwain 1.5B: An Arabic SLM via Language Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15120/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ASCAT: An Arabic Scientific Corpus and Benchmark for Advanced Translation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00015/) (2026)
- [RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo: An Open Sub-1B Arabic Language Model via Vocabulary Injection and Edge-First Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28827/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Mutarjim, a compact yet powerful language model for bidirectional Arabic-English translation. While large-scale LLMs have shown impressive progress in natural language processing tasks, including machine translation, smaller models. Leveraging this insight, we developed Mutarjim based on Kuwain-1.5B , a language model tailored for both Arabic and English. Despite its modest size, Mutarjim outperforms much larger models on several established benchmarks, achieved through an optimized two-phase training approach and a carefully curated, high-quality training corpus.. Experimental results show that Mutarjim rivals models up to 20 times larger while significantly reducing computational costs and training requirements. We also introduce Tarjama-25, a new benchmark designed to overcome limitations in existing Arabic-English benchmarking datasets, such as domain narrowness, short sentence lengths, and English-source bias. Tarjama-25 comprises 5,000 expert-reviewed sentence pairs and spans a wide range of domains, offering a more comprehensive and balanced evaluation framework. Notably, Mutarjim achieves state-of-the-art performance on the English-to-Arabic task in Tarjama-25, surpassing even significantly larger and proprietary models like GPT-4o mini. We publicly release Tarjama-25 to support future research and advance the evaluation of Arabic-English translation systems.