Code and data for “Reflective Translation: Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation through Self-Reflection” (English→isiZulu/isiXhosa, BLEU/COMET, reflection + Self-Refine baselines).
# Reflective Translation for Low-Resource Machine Translation
This repository contains code and analysis for **Reflective Translation**, a reflection-guided prompting framework that improves machine translation quality for low-resource languages **without fine-tuning**.
We evaluate English → isiZulu and English → isiXhosa translation using GPT-3.5 and Claude Haiku 3.5, reporting consistent BLEU and COMET improvements across reflection, prompting strategies, and confidence thresholds.
This repository supports **full reproduction of all experiments, tables, and figures** in the associated paper.
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## Paper
**Reflective Translation: Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation through Self-Reflection**
Nicholas Cheng
arXiv:2601.19871 (2026)
📄 Reflective Translation: Imp…
```bibtex
@article{cheng2026reflective,
title={Reflective Translation: Enhancing Low-Resource Machine Translation through Self-Reflection},
author={Cheng, Nicholas},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19871},
year={2026}
}
```
## Overview
Reflective Translation introduces a lightweight, inference-time framework in which a language model:
1. Produces an initial translation
2. Generates a structured self-critique identifying translation errors
3. Produces a revised translation guided by masked reflective feedback
This approach improves semantic fidelity and robustness in low-resource settings without additional training data or parameter updates.
## Datasets
All datasets are loaded programmatically from HuggingFace at runtime.
OPUS-100 (English–isiZulu, English–isiXhosa)
huggingface.co
NTREX-African (isiZulu, isiXhosa test sets)
ntrex_african
Raw parallel corpora are not redistributed in this repository.
## Repository Structure
```
├── src/reflective_translation/ # Core package (prompts, metrics, pipeline)
├── scripts/ # Experiment and figure generation scripts
├── outputs/
│ ├── …