Translating Classical Poetry into Modern Prose
arXiv:2606.02806
The paper presents Padyam2Gadyam, a dataset of 13th‑17th century Telugu classical poems paired with human‑verified modern Telugu and English prose translations, and evaluates machine translation systems and large language models on the poem‑to‑prose translation task.
Abstract
We introduce Padyam2Gadyam a dataset for the task of poem-to-prose translation from 13th-17th Century Telugu Classical Poetry to contemporary Telugu and English prose. The dataset consists of 600 poems and their human-verified Telugu and English prose translations. We evaluated 2 machine translation systems and 5 contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to do poem-to-prose translation into Telugu and English using this dataset. Our results indicate that while the general purpose LLMs are better than the machine translation systems for this task, there are systematic issues with the generation and evaluation of prose translation in both languages across systems.
Preprint