# Lost in Translation? A Comparative Study on the Cross-Lingual Transfer of Composite Harms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Safe RLHF: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12773/) (2023)

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

- [When Cow Urine Cures Constipation on YouTube: Limits of LLMs in Detecting Culture-specific Health Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22002/) (2026)
- [LLM Safety Alignment in Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14626/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) remain anchored in English. Translation is often used as a shortcut to probe multilingual behavior, but it rarely captures the full picture, especially when harmful intent or structure morphs across languages. Some types of harm survive translation almost intact, while others distort or disappear. To study this effect, we introduce CompositeHarm, a translation-based benchmark designed to examine how safety alignment holds up as both syntax and semantics shift. It combines two complementary English datasets, AttaQ, which targets structured adversarial attacks, and MMSafetyBench, which covers contextual, real-world harms, and extends them into six languages: English, Hindi, Assamese, Marathi, Kannada, and Gujarati. Using three large models, we find that attack success rates rise sharply in Indic languages, especially under adversarial syntax, while contextual harms transfer more moderately. To ensure scalability and energy efficiency, our study adopts lightweight inference strategies inspired by edge-AI design principles, reducing redundant evaluation passes while preserving cross-lingual fidelity. This design makes large-scale multilingual safety testing both computationally feasible and environmentally conscious. Overall, our results show that translated benchmarks are a necessary first step, but not a sufficient one, toward building grounded, resource-aware, language-adaptive safety systems.