# EuroAlpaca: Task-Preserving Localisation of Instruction Data for European Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05043/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

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

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04721/) (2020)
- [Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08958/) (2023)
- [Translationese as a Language in "Multilingual" NMT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03823/) (2019)
- [MultiLoKo: a multilingual local knowledge benchmark for LLMs spanning 31 languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10356/) (2025)
- [TaCo: Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer for Low-Resource Languages in LLMs through Translation-Assisted Chain-of-Thought Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10797/) (2023)
- [X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19744/) (2024)
- [MURI: High-Quality Instruction Tuning Datasets for Low-Resource Languages via Reverse Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12958/) (2024)
- [Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04369/) (2025)
- [XIFBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Multilingual Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07539/) (2025)
- [M2Lingual: Enhancing Multilingual, Multi-Turn Instruction Alignment in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16783/) (2024)
- [Multilingual Dialogue Generation and Localization with Dialogue Act Scripting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22086/) (2025)
- [Using Machine Translation to Localize Task Oriented NLG Output](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04512/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine translation (MT) offers a scalable way to extend English instruction-tuning data to multiple languages, but it can distort task-critical constraints and required outputs, creating corrupted training examples and degrading models trained on such data. We introduce EuroAlpaca, a task-preserving localisation pipeline and near-parallel resource covering 50 European languages and regional varieties, together with European-IFEval, a multilingual benchmark for verifiable instruction following. Depending on the example, our pipeline applies field-wise MT while preserving task-critical content or reconstructs a task-equivalent target-language instance, followed by validation of cross-field coherence and target-language consistency. Across LoRA experiments with four LLMs, training on directly translated data improves ROUGE-L and F-BERT on the Aya Evaluation Suite, but reduces accuracy on European-IFEval by 29.8% relative to the unadapted baseline. In contrast, adaptation with EuroAlpaca improves accuracy by 12.9% over the same baseline, reversing the degradation caused by direct MT, while also achieving the highest ROUGE-L and F-BERT scores on Aya. These results show that preserving task semantics is essential for multilingual instruction tuning.