Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Translation Error Detection:An English--Greek Contrastive Study

Abstract

Multilingual sentence embeddings are increasingly used to estimate semantic similarity across languages, yet their sensitivity to fine-grained translation errors remains insufficiently understood. This study investigates whether general-purpose multilingual embedding models can distinguish correct English-Greek translations from minimally modified erroneous alternatives. A contrastive dataset was developed from FLORES+ sentence-aligned reference translations and reviewed by two translation experts. It contains 1,850 examples across ten core and five exploratory error categories, covering factual, lexical-semantic, grammatical, relational, referential, and discourse-level phenomena. Five multilingual sentence-embedding models (BGE-M3, Multilingual E5, Multilingual MPNet, LaBSE, and Jina Embeddings v3) were evaluated using cosine similarity between each English source sentence and its correct and erroneous Greek translations. A reference-free COMETKiwi model was also evaluated as an MT quality-estimation baseline. Performance was assessed through contrastive accuracy and score margins for category-specific sensitivity. BGE-M3 achieved the highest accuracy among embedding models at 89.30 percent, while COMETKiwi achieved 94.49 percent. Embedding models detected explicit factual and lexical changes more reliably than tense-and-aspect and pronoun-coreference errors. COMETKiwi improved performance on several difficult categories, including tense and aspect, pronoun and coreference, and semantic-role errors, but showed lower sensitivity to date-and-time errors and underperformed the embedding models on numbers. The results show complementary error-sensitivity profiles: multilingual sentence embeddings provide useful semantic adequacy signals but are better suited as components of broader translation-evaluation frameworks than as standalone metrics.