# Can Linguistically Related Languages Guide LLM Translation in Low-Resource Settings?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16660/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05019/) (2019)
- [Tower: An Open Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17733/) (2024)
- [When Scaling Meets LLM Finetuning: The Effect of Data, Model and Finetuning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17193/) (2024)
- [In-context Examples Selection for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02437/) (2022)
- [IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16307/) (2023)
- [Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09102/) (2022)
- [The unreasonable effectiveness of few-shot learning for machine translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01398/) (2023)
- [BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09535/) (2022)
- [Bloom Library: Multimodal Datasets in 300+ Languages for a Variety of Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14712/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of In-context Learning in LLMs for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12097/) (2024)
- [Pivot Language for Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14553/) (2025)
- [How Well Do LLMs Understand Tunisian Arabic?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16683/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many downstream tasks, yet their effectiveness in extremely low-resource machine translation remains limited. Standard adaptation techniques typically rely on large-scale parallel data or extensive fine-tuning, which are infeasible for the long tail of underrepresented languages. In this work, we investigate a more constrained question: in data-scarce settings, to what extent can linguistically similar pivot languages and few-shot demonstrations provide useful guidance for on-the-fly adaptation in LLMs? We study a data-efficient experimental setup that combines linguistically related pivot languages with few-shot in-context examples, without any parameter updates, and evaluate translation behavior under controlled conditions. Our analysis shows that while pivot-based prompting can yield improvements in certain configurations, particularly in settings where the target language is less well represented in the model's vocabulary, the gains are often modest and sensitive to few shot example construction. For closely related or better represented varieties, we observe diminishing or inconsistent gains. Our findings provide empirical guidance on how and when inference-time prompting and pivot-based examples can be used as a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning in low-resource translation settings.