Obscuring Data Contamination Through Translation: Evidence from Arabic Corpora

TL;DR

This paper investigates how data contamination affects multilingual language models, especially through translation, and proposes a translation-aware detection method to improve contamination identification across languages.

Contribution

It introduces a translation-aware contamination detection approach that effectively uncovers data contamination in multilingual benchmarks, addressing limitations of English-only methods.

Findings

Translation suppresses traditional contamination signals.

Models benefit from contaminated data even in Arabic.

Translation-aware detection reliably exposes contamination.

Abstract

Data contamination undermines the validity of Large Language Model evaluation by enabling models to rely on memorized benchmark content rather than true generalization. While prior work has proposed contamination detection methods, these approaches are largely limited to English benchmarks, leaving multilingual contamination poorly understood. In this work, we investigate contamination dynamics in multilingual settings by fine-tuning several open-weight LLMs on varying proportions of Arabic datasets and evaluating them on original English benchmarks. To detect memorization, we extend the Tested Slot Guessing method with a choice-reordering strategy and incorporate Min-K% probability analysis, capturing both behavioral and distributional contamination signals. Our results show that translation into Arabic suppresses conventional contamination indicators, yet models still benefit from exposure to contaminated data, particularly those with stronger Arabic capabilities. This effect is consistently reflected in rising Mink% scores and increased cross-lingual answer consistency as contamination levels grow. To address this blind spot, we propose Translation-Aware Contamination Detection, which identifies contamination by comparing signals across multiple translated benchmark variants rather than English alone. The Translation-Aware Contamination Detection reliably exposes contamination even when English-only methods fail. Together, our findings highlight the need for multilingual, translation-aware evaluation pipelines to ensure fair, transparent, and reproducible assessment of LLMs.