Lost in Translation: When Safety Contracts Collapse Across 2.1 Billion Voices
A chatbot walks into a multilingual market Imagine a bank, hospital, telecom platform, or public-service chatbot being rolled out across South Asia. The model has passed English safety tests. It refuses harmful requests in structured evaluation. Its vendor dashboard looks reassuring. The compliance team exhales. Then users arrive. They do not all write in English. They do not all use one script. They mix Hindi and English, write Urdu in Latin letters, switch between native script and romanization, and ask ordinary questions wrapped in messy instructions. In other words, they behave like real users, which is always inconvenient for benchmark design. ...