Lexical Changes in Multilingual LLM Translation Relay: An Exploratory Pilot Study

This exploratory pilot study examines lexical and potential semantic changes in a short narrative translated through a multilingual large language model (LLM) relay. The narrative was translated from English into Japanese, then Swahili and Spanish, before being translated back into English using Gemini 3.8 Flash. The study compares the original and intermediate translations with the final English text, examines platform-displayed commentary associated with the translation process, and measures lexical diversity at the English endpoints. Qualitative comparison identified lexical substitutions, phrase expansion, changes in stylistic naturalness, and possible shifts in semantic emphasis. The findings illustrate the value of examining lexical change, semantic preservation, and model-displayed commentary as distinct analytical dimensions. Because the study uses one narrative, one model, one language route, and one run, the results are descriptive and exploratory and cannot establish general effects of multilingual relay translation.