Multilingual Contextualization of Large Language Models for Document-Level Machine Translation
Moura Ramos, M.
;
Fernandes, P.
; Agrawal, S. A.
;
Martins, A.
Multilingual Contextualization of Large Language Models for Document-Level Machine Translation, Proc Conference on Language Modeling COLM, Montreal, Canada, Vol. , pp. - , October, 2025.
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Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in sentence-level machine translation, but scaling to document-level translation remains challenging, particularly in modeling long-range dependencies and discourse phenomena across sentences and paragraphs. In this work, we propose a method to improve LLM-based long-document translation through targeted fine-tuning on high-quality document-level data, which we curate and introduce as DocBlocks. Our approach supports multiple translation paradigms, including direct document-to-document and chunk-level translation, by integrating instructions both with and without surrounding context. This enables models to better capture cross-sentence dependencies while maintaining strong sentence-level translation performance. Experimental results show that incorporating multiple translation paradigms improves document-level translation quality and inference speed compared to prompting and agent-based methods.