Gold vs.~Translation: Are We Measuring Language, Knowledge, or Locality in Translated Benchmarks?
Klaudia-Doris Thellmann, Bernhard Stadler, Dan Saattrup Nielsen, Michael Färber, Jens Lehmann
Translated versions of English-origin benchmarks such as MMLU are widely used to evaluate large language models in non-English languages, yet it remains unclear whether they measure the same constructs as natively created benchmarks. We frame this as a proxy validity question and compare DeepL-translated MMLU proxies against six native benchmarks in seven pairings across five Nordic and Baltic languages, evaluating 29 models on each pairing. Beyond ranking agreement, we test incremental proxy validity: does the translated score add predictive value for native performance after controlling for model size and language proficiency? Proxy validity varies substantially across benchmark pairings. Applying the same robustness criteria to all seven pairings, we find four robust effects, two marginal effects, and one null result. The strongest evidence occurs for curriculum-overlap benchmarks such as Skolprov ($ΔR^2$=.128, 95% CI [.038,.253]), whereas translated MMLU provides no significant incremental value for Sweden-specific factual knowledge in SwedishFacts (p=.242). Because SwedishFacts is also the only open-ended benchmark, we cannot fully separate the effects of local content and response format. Overall, the results indicate a clear pattern: translated benchmarks provide a better proxy when their source content overlaps with the native evaluation target, while locally anchored knowledge is less reliably captured.
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