D 2025

Prompting Large Language Models for Church Slavic Translation

SIGNORONI, Edoardo and Pavel RYCHLÝ

Basic information

Original name

Prompting Large Language Models for Church Slavic Translation

Authors

SIGNORONI, Edoardo and Pavel RYCHLÝ

Edition

Brno, Proceedings of the Nineteenth Workshop on Recent Advances in Slavonic Natural Languages Processing, RASLAN 2025, p. 57-68, 12 pp. 2025

Publisher

Tribun EU

Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Proceedings paper

Country of publisher

Czech Republic

Confidentiality degree

is not subject to a state or trade secret

Publication form

electronic version available online

References:

URL

Marked to be transferred to RIV

No

Organization

Fakulta informatiky – Repository – Repository

ISBN

978-80-263-1858-3

ISSN

Keywords in English

Large Language Models; Machine Translation; Church Slavic; Low-Resource Languages; Historical Languages

Links

LM2023062, research and development project.
Changed: 9/1/2026 00:51, RNDr. Daniel Jakubík

Abstract

In the original language

Church Slavic is a low-resource historical language with limited resources and few experts. We explore the capabilities of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) as Church Slavic translators by prompting multiple models in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. We evaluate four LLMs of varying sizes on 262 sentence pairs translating Church Slavic into English and German, and conduct a second experiment examining the impact of model size using five Qwen2.5-Instruct variants. Our results show that on average EuroLLM-9B-Instruct achieves the best performance, outperforming much larger models. We find minimal benefit from few-shot prompting and performance gaps between English and German as target languages. The automated evaluation metrics suggest that LLMs can produce useful draft translations for Church Slavic, potentially assisting scholars in accessing historical texts.
Displayed: 2/5/2026 21:31