"Be My Cheese?": Cultural Nuance Benchmarking for Machine Translation in Multilingual LLMs

We present a large-scale human evaluation benchmark for assessing cultural localisation in machine translation produced by state-of-the-art multilingual large language models (LLMs). Existing MT benchmarks emphasise token-level and grammatical accuracy, but often overlook the pragmatic and culturally grounded competencies required for real-world localisation. Building on a pilot study of 87 translations across 20 languages, we evaluate 7 multilingual LLMs across 15 target languages with 5 native-speaker raters per language. Each rater scored both full-text translations and segment-level instances of culturally nuanced language (idioms, puns, holidays, and culturally embedded concepts) on an ordinal 0-3 quality scale; segment ratings additionally included an NA option for untranslated segments. Across full-text evaluations, mean overall quality is modest (1.68/3): GPT-5 (2.10/3), Claude Sonnet 4 (1.97/3), and Mistral Medium 3.1 (1.84/3) form the strongest tier with fewer catastrophic failures. Segment-level results show sharp category effects: holidays (2.20/3) and cultural concepts (2.19/3) translate notably better than idioms (1.65/3) and puns (1.45/3), and idioms are most likely to be left untranslated. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using Krippendorff's α and Gwet's AC2, indicating moderate agreement overall (Krippendorff's α = 0.45) with the lowest agreement for puns. These findings demonstrate a persistent gap between grammatical adequacy and cultural resonance. To our knowledge, this is the first multilingual, human-annotated benchmark focused explicitly on cultural nuance in translation and localisation. The results highlight the need for culturally informed training data, improved cross-lingual pragmatics, and evaluation frameworks that support systematic benchmarking of culturally grounded translation.