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Terminology-Augmented Generation for Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Controlled LLM-Based Translation Framework

Paper · 2026 · Wanda Punzi Zarino and Pilar Sánchez Gijón

Summary

The paper tackles a recurring problem in machine translation of culturally loaded vocabulary: keeping LLMs consistent with curated terminology. The domain is traditional Campanian food, translated from Italian into Spanish. The authors built a concept-oriented bilingual termbase in YAML from the regional PAT register. Each entry has three layers: conceptual (definitions, production and cultural notes), linguistic (POS, gender, variants) and translational (strategy labels, preferred equivalents, genre rules). A local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server detects terms in each source text and returns the matching entries and genre policies. These are injected into the prompt, and a rule-based post-processing step then enforces the required surface forms. Mistral 7B Instruct and Gemma3 4B were compared under three conditions on 30 authentic texts from three genres. Pairing injection with deterministic enforcement tended to raise terminological compliance, but instruction-following differed noticeably between the models and across genres. The work shows how structured terminology, rather than similarity-based RAG, can steer small local models in heritage-sensitive translation.

Key points

  • The termbase covers 28 gastronomic preparations drawn from the 610 products in the Campania PAT register. Examples include ciauliello, frittata di scammaro and cicci di Santa Lucia.
  • The MCP tools are glossary_for_text_json, which does boundary-aware, Unicode-safe term matching including multiword terms and variants, and translate_usage, which returns genre-specific policies.
  • The test set has 30 real Italian texts, 10 for each genre: regulatory-administrative, promotional-touristic and narrative-cultural. The genres were chosen to follow Sabatini's cline of communicative constraint.
  • Each genre has its own rule:
    • Regulatory texts keep the Italian term inside «angle quotes».
    • Promotional texts use the Spanish equivalent plus a parenthetical expansion based on the production note.
    • Narrative texts use the equivalent plus a comma-introduced gloss based on the cultural note.
  • The three conditions are BASELINE (shared system prompt only), INJ (glossary injection) and INJ+ENF (injection plus deterministic enforcement). The open-weight models Mistral 7B Instruct and Gemma3 4B both ran locally.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universitat Autònoma de BarcelonaCerdanyola del Vallès · Spain5 works · 9,880 citations🎓Parthenope University of NaplesNaples · Italy2 works

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

Cite

Cite as Wanda Punzi Zarino and Pilar Sánchez Gijón. 2026. Terminology-Augmented Generation for Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Controlled LLM-Based Translation Framework. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context (DeTermIt! 2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/43bmxwahuzmq

@inproceedings{zarino2026terminology,
  title = {{Terminology-Augmented Generation for Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Controlled LLM-Based Translation Framework}},
  author = {Wanda Punzi Zarino and Pilar Sánchez Gijón},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context (DeTermIt! 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/43bmxwahuzmq},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/43bmxwahuzmq}
}

References

19 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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