Beyond Semantics: Measuring Fine-Grained Emotion Preservation in Small Language Model-Based Machine Translation

arXiv:2604.27920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preserving affective nuance remains a challenge in Machine Translation (MT), where semantic equivalence often takes precedence over emotional fidelity. This paper evaluates the performance of three state-of-the-art Small Language Models (SLMs) -- EuroLLM, Aya Expanse, and Gemma -- in maintaining fine-grained emotions during backtranslation. Using the GoEmotions dataset, which comprises Reddit comments across 28 distinct categories, we assess emot