# Multi-Method Validation of Large Language Model Medical Translation Across High- and Low-Resource Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22642/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [Are Language Models Borrowing-Blind? A Multilingual Evaluation of Loanword Identification across 10 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26254/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language barriers affect 27.3 million U.S. residents with non-English language preference, yet professional medical translation remains costly and often unavailable. We evaluated four frontier large language models (GPT-5.1, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Kimi K2) translating 22 medical documents into 8 languages spanning high-resource (Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese), medium-resource (Korean, Arabic), and low-resource (Tagalog, Haitian Creole) categories using a five-layer validation framework. Across 704 translation pairs, all models achieved high semantic preservation (LaBSE greater than 0.92), with no significant difference between high- and low-resource languages (p = 0.066). Cross-model back-translation confirmed results were not driven by same-model circularity (delta = -0.0009). Inter-model concordance across four independently trained models was high (LaBSE: 0.946), and lexical borrowing analysis showed no correlation between English term retention and fidelity scores in low-resource languages (rho = +0.018, p = 0.82). These converging results suggest frontier LLMs preserve medical meaning across resource levels, with implications for language access in healthcare.