2025.findings-emnlp.1289@ACL

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#1 Source-primed Multi-turn Conversation Helps Large Language Models Translate Documents [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Hanxu Hu, Jannis Vamvas, Rico Sennrich

LLMs have paved the way for truly simple document-level machine translation, but challenges such as omission errors remain. In this paper, we study a simple method for handling document-level machine translation, by leveraging previous contexts in a multi-turn conversational manner. Specifically, by decomposing documents into segments and iteratively translating them while maintaining previous turns, this method ensures coherent translations without additional training, and can fully re-use the KV cache of previous turns thus minimizing computational overhead. We further propose a ‘source-primed’ method that first provides the whole source document before multi-turn translation. We empirically show this multi-turn method outperforms both translating entire documents in a single turn and translating each segment independently according to multiple automatic metrics in representative LLMs, establishing a strong baseline for document-level translation using LLMs.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Findings