Some notable insights:
- GPT-5 is strong at text normalization and translation but regressed on content generation vs GPT-4o. Chinese outputs had spacing/punctuation issues, Polish read like "translationese" even with no source text.
- Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 4.56/5 on Kinyarwanda. In our first study (late 2024), no model could produce coherent text in that language.
- Top LLMs outscored humans working under realistic constraints (time-limited, single pass, no QA). Humans didn't rank 1st in any language. (We're now planning a follow-up to zoom in on that.)
- Tokenizer efficiency matters again: reasoning models burn 5-10x more tokens thinking. Claude Sonnet 4.5 encodes Tamil at 1.19 chars/token vs Gemini's 4.24 — ~3.5x cost difference for the same output. There has been a lot of talk about the Opus 4.7 tokenizer, this is the same issue, just in multilingual setting.
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