Translating Classical Poetry into Modern Prose
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-06-01
Updated: 2026-09-01
Comments: Accepted to INLG 2026
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: We built a dataset for the task of poem-to-prose translation from 13th-17th Century Telugu classical poetry to contemporary Telugu and English prose, which we call Padyam2Gadyam.
Terminology
Abstract
We built a dataset for the task of poem-to-prose translation from 13th-17th Century Telugu classical poetry to contemporary Telugu and English prose, which we call Padyam2Gadyam. The dataset consists of 600 poems and their human-verified Telugu and English prose translations. We evaluated 2 machine translation systems and 5 contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to do zero-shot poem-to-prose translation into Telugu and English using this dataset. Our results indicate that while the general purpose LLMs are better than the machine translation systems, there are systematic issues with the generation and evaluation of prose translation in both languages across systems.
Sources
- Command A: An Enterprise-Ready Large Language Model
- GhazalBench: Canonical Verse Access in LLMs across Persian Ghazals and Shakespearean Sonnets
- A Computational Approach to Style in American Poetry
- Gemma 3 Technical Report
- Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report
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