The Lay of the Land in Idiom-Translation Quality Estimation

Abstract

Idioms have long been a challenge for machine translation, and while large language models (LLMs) have proven increasingly adept at handling them, whether quality estimation (QE) systems have kept pace and can reliably score idiomatic renderings of these expressions above faulty literal ones remains unclear. We introduce the first parallel dataset pairing idiom-bearing English sentences with both literal and idiomatic translations across nine target languages, augmented into multi-sentence segments and a graded literality continuum. Using this dataset, we benchmark eleven conventional QE metrics from the COMET and MetricX families and ten LLMs from the Qwen-3, Gemma-4 and OLMo-3 families used as GEMBA-style judges. We find that most systems, especially older metrics and smaller models, display a marked literality bias, rating literal translations of idioms above idiomatic ones. Higher parameter counts and newer training sets appear to reduce this bias to an extent; nevertheless, of all the benchmarked systems, only MetricX-24-Hybrid (XL, XXL) and Gemma-4-31B consistently rate idiomatic translations of idioms above literal ones, and only Gemma-4-31B reliably ranks intermediate degrees of idiomaticity and literality. Our findings caution against deploying standard QE metrics in domains rich in figurative language, where higher scores might be rewarding undesirable literalism.