Culturally-Adapted Red-Teaming Across East and Southeast Asian Contexts: A Methodological and Comparative Analysis

Multilingual safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on direct translation (DT) of English benchmarks into target languages an approach that converts surface-level linguistic form while failing to reflect the cultural context embedded in threat scenarios, social norms, and legal frameworks. We construct paired DT and culturally-adapted (CA) datasets via 1:1 seed matching for four languages—Japanese (JA), Thai (TH), Korean (KO), and Khmer (KM)—and compare Attack Success Rate (ASR) and Cultural Realism scores across four open-source SLMs. CA prompts yield ∆ASR >0 across all 16 language × model combinations (mean +9.3 pp), and DT-based evaluation underestimates risk in 44 of 48 category × language combinations. Language-level analysis reveals that the distribution of threat forms is heterogeneous across languages. Cultural Realism analysis further shows that DT Cultural Depth (C3) scores remain consistently below 1.0 out of 3.0 across all four languages (mean 0.17), whereas CA scores reach up to 2.51, indicating that direct translation produces inputs systematically divergent from those encountered in real-world multicultural settings. These findings demonstrate that adapting benchmarks to language-specific cultural contexts—rather than relying on linguistic translation alone is necessary for valid multilingual LLM safety evaluation.