AI RESEARCH
The Translation Tax Is Not a Scalar: A Counterfactual Audit of English-Source Cue Inheritance in Chinese Multilingual Benchmarks
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2605.07093v1 Announce Type: cross The Translation Tax is often treated as a scalar: translated benchmarks are assumed to inflate scores by preserving English-source cues. We audit this claim in an English-to-Chinese setting. Three proxy estimators disagree: back-translation gaps are small and parser-fragile; cue-score calibration does not predict item-level gains; and a six-model native-control comparison shows model-family rather than uniform benchmark effects.