Textual overlap rather than domain alignment: A comparative study of fine-tuning strategies for specialised machine translation with large language models
General-purpose large language models (LLMs) may struggle in specialised machine translation, but the conditions under which fine-tuning improves translation performance remain unclear. This study compares full-parameter fine-tuning (FPFT) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for Chinese-English political discourse translation using a purpose-built corpus and the Qwen3-14B model. Translation performance was assessed on three 50-item test sets using BLEU, ROUGE-L F1, METEOR, and BERTScore F1, together with BLEU pass-rate likelihood-ratio G2 tests, paired t-tests, and paired Cohen’s dz for item-level score differences. The results reveal a clear contrast between unseen in-domain evaluation, maximum-overlap benchmarking, and semantically related but non-fine-tuned evaluation. On Test Set A and Test Set C, neither fine-tuning strategy produced a statistically significant BLEU pass-rate advantage over the base model, and paired tests across the continuous metrics did not show consistent fine-tuning gains. On Test Set B, which was sampled from the fine-tuning corpus, both fine-tuned models substantially outperformed the base model across all four metrics, with FPFT achieving the highest scores and PEFT providing a more computationally efficient alternative. These findings indicate that textual overlap between training and deployment data, rather than broad domain similarity alone, strongly conditions the observed benefit of fine-tuning. The study offers an empirically grounded framework for selecting fine-tuning strategies in specialised machine translation.