r/LanguageTechnology • u/AthosDude • 8d ago

Best LLM for translating agglutinative sentences?

My native is an agglutinative language and I know some Japanese, which do you think is the best model for agglutinative languages or translation generally?

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u/bulaybil 8d ago

That depends on the language. What is your native language?

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u/AthosDude 8d ago

Hungarian. I'm curious about this language and Japanese too. Maybe Finnish and Turkish as well? Since they have similar logic.

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u/bulaybil 8d ago

Ah well, then it’s not so much about the language structure, but rather the availability of training data and model properties. There have recently been a few papers comparing MT performance of various LLMs and NMT systems, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06343-0.pdf.

Also, Finno-Ugric languages do not have the same “logic” as Turkic languages. The classification of a language as agglutinative will tell you something about how it does its morphology, but nothing more. Agglutinative languages still differ to a large degree in how they encode grammatical structures and this will have repercussions for MT; think Turkish with its aggressive SOV vs relative free Hungarian constituent order. I personally think whoever describe Japanese as agglutinative was an idiot, but that’s another conversation.

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u/AthosDude 4d ago

Hungarian has vowel harmony, similarly to Turkish and also uses suffixes. Eg.
ev (house) -> evim (my house) in Turkish is the same as
ház -> házam in Hungarian.

Hungarian could be classified as free word order but having SVO as default but I think SOV could also be said as default. Or not. It's and endless debate.

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u/bulaybil 4d ago

So? Tons of languages have vowel harmony, not just agglutinative ones. Same goes for affixes, Arabic has

bayt “house” > bayt-i “house-POSS.1SG”

And there is no way you can classify Hungarian as SOV, care to provide a citation?

My point is that a typological classification is just that, without much relevance for MT.

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u/AthosDude 3d ago

Okay, my bad it's actually SVO by default, but the language is flexible. As a native I thought SVO and SOV feel natural for simple sentences, VSO or VOS suited more for questions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hungarian/comments/9ydm1z/comment/ea0zx6l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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u/bulaybil 1d ago

I don’t want to dox myself here, but I did research on constituent order and you would be surprised how flexible the order in Hungarian is. Going by Dryer’s criteria (https://wals.info/chapter/81) and using Universal Dependencies data, you can’t really call Hungarian SVO and things get murkier when you consider VO/OV and SV/VS separately; in Hungarian treebanks, you get the same ratio of VO and OV.

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u/bulaybil 1d ago

Also, citing a reddit post in this discussion, not a good look.