Is Multilingual LLM Watermarking Truly Multilingual? A Simple Back-Translation Solution

Abstract

Multilingual watermarking aims to make large language model (LLM) outputs traceable across languages, yet current methods still fall short. Despite claims of cross-lingual robustness, they are evaluated only on high-resource languages. We show that existing multilingual watermarking methods are not truly multilingual: they fail to remain robust under translation attacks in medium- and low-resource languages. We trace this failure to semantic clustering, which fails when the tokenizer vocabulary contains too few full-word tokens for a given language. To address this, we introduce STEAM, a back-translation-based detection method that restores watermark strength lost through translation. STEAM is compatible with any watermarking method, robust across different tokenizers and languages, non-invasive, and easily extendable to new languages. With average gains of +0.19 AUC and +40%p TPR@1% on 17 languages, STEAM provides a simple and robust path toward fairer watermarking across diverse languages.

@misc{mohamed2025steam,
      title={Is Multilingual LLM Watermarking Truly Multilingual? A Simple Back-Translation Solution}, 
      author={Asim Mohamed and Martin Gubri},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2510.18019},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18019}, 
}