AI-assisted cultural heritage dissemination: Comparing NMT and glossary-augmented LLM translation in rock art documents

A study presented at the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) found that glossary-augmented prompting of the Gemini LLM achieved the highest exact-match terminology accuracy (81.4%) in translating a Spanish rock art text into English, compared with 69.1% for Gemini with a basic prompt and 64.4% for DeepL, while preserving overall quality (mean DA 85.3 vs. 85.2 for Gemini-Simple and 80.3 for DeepL). The authors, Vicent Briva-Iglesias and María Ferre Fernández, conclude that glossary-augmented prompting is a low-overhead way to improve terminology control in cultural-heritage translation.

Abstract Cultural heritage institutions increasingly disseminate research and interpretive materials globally, but multilingual dissemination is constrained by limited budgets and staffing. In terminology-dense domains such as rock art, translation quality depends on accurate, consistent specialised terms, and small lexical errors can mislead non-specialists and reduce reuse. We compare three English MT setups for a Spanish academic rock art text: 1 DeepL as a strong NMT baseline, 2 Gemini-Simple LLM with a basic prompt , and 3 Gemini-RAG the same LLM with glossary-augmented prompting via lightweight retrieval of term pairs . Using PEARMUT, we conduct a human evaluation via i multi-way Direct Assessment 0–100 on 91 segments 1,743 Spanish words and ii targeted terminology auditing with a restricted MQM taxonomy. Gemini-RAG yields the highest exact-match terminology accuracy 81.4% , versus Gemini-Simple 69.1% and DeepL 64.4% , while preserving overall quality mean DA 85.3 Gemini-RAG vs. 85.2 Gemini-Simple and outperforming DeepL 80.3 . These results show that glossary-augmented prompting is a low-overhead way to improve terminology control in cultural-heritage translation, provided that institutions maintain minimal terminology resources and lightweight evaluation procedures.- Anthology ID: - 2026.eamt-1.49 - Volume: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation Volume 1 /volumes/2026.eamt-1/ - Month: - June - Year: - 2026 - Address: - Tilburg, The Netherlands - Editors: Dimitar Shterionov /people/dimitar-shterionov/unverified/ , Eva Vanmassenhove /people/eva-vanmassenhove/ , Mirella De Sisto /people/mirella-de-sisto/unverified/ , Fred Blain /people/frederic-blain/ , Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami /people/javad-pourmostafa-roshan-sharami/ , Lisa Lepp /people/lisa-lepp/unverified/ , Chiara Manna /people/chiara-manna/unverified/ , Argentina Anna Rescigno /people/argentina-anna-rescigno/ , Alina Karakanta /people/alina-karakanta/unverified/ , Ayla Rigouts Terryn /people/ayla-rigouts-terryn/ , Manuel Lardelli /people/manuel-lardelli/ , Natalia Resende /people/natalia-resende/unverified/ , Elena Murgolo /people/elena-murgolo/unverified/ , Janiça Hackenbuchner /people/janica-hackenbuchner/ , Anna Zaretskaya /people/anna-zaretskaya/unverified/ , Miquel Esplà-Gomis /people/miquel-espla-gomis/unverified/ , Thierry Etchegoyhen /people/thierry-etchegoyhen/unverified/ , Dagmar Gromann /people/dagmar-gromann/ , Rachel Bawden /people/rachel-bawden/ , Barry Haddow /people/barry-haddow/unverified/ , Sara Szoc /people/sara-szoc/unverified/ , Mikel Forcada /people/mikel-l-forcada/ , Helena Moniz /people/helena-moniz/ - Venue: EAMT /venues/eamt/ - SIG: - Publisher: - European Association for Machine Translation - Note: - Pages: - 774–786 - Language: - URL: https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.49/ https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.49/ - DOI: - Cite ACL : - Vicent Briva-Iglesias and María Ferre Fernández. 2026. AI-assisted cultural heritage dissemination: Comparing NMT and glossary-augmented LLM translation in rock art documents https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.49/ . In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation Volume 1 , pages 774–786, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation. - Cite Informal : AI-assisted cultural heritage dissemination: Comparing NMT and glossary-augmented LLM translation in rock art documents https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.49/ Briva-Iglesias & Fernández, EAMT 2026 - PDF: https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.49.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.49.pdf