WMT26 General MT shared task

[Kocmi T.]

Dear all,

We'd like to officially announce the 21st iteration of the General Machine Translation task and invite you to participate. Here is the list of main changes:

• You may participate in up to 20 language pairs out of which we host several new ones: 
• Czech to Vietnamese
• Chinese to Japanese (direction reversed)
• EN to Armenian
• EN to Belarusian
• EN to Indonesian
• EN to Kazakh
• EN to Ladin
• EN to Ligurian
• EN to Northern Sámi
• Instruction following context: we will include additional instructions on how to translate the text. System may disregard them but failing to follow instructions will be considered a translation error. You can expect following phenomena: formal/informal voice, glossaries, structured translation (JSON, HTML, ...), style and expressions (e.g. "yuhuuu", "tbh")
• Multimodal context - same as last year, for spoken domain, we provide original video, while for other domains, image can be provided with additional context (such as screenshots or infographics). Purely text-to-text systems can still participate as in the past
• All systems will be human evaluated (no downsampling using automatic metrics) and we are preparing a new contrastive humeval protocol
• LLM benchmarking focussed on open-weight models
• Abstract submission has been replaced with a model card poll

All details are available at https://www2.statmt.org/wmt25/translation-task.html

We will be clarifying details on the webpage.

We are looking forward for your participation,
Tom Kocmi
(in Europe, [kotsmi], he/him)

[Kocmi T.]

I appologize for linking last year's webpage, the webpage for this year is: https://www2.statmt.org/wmt26/