Abstract:The remarkable understanding and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved translation performance. However, incorrect understanding of the sentence to be translated can degrade translation quality. To address this issue, we proposed a novel Iterative Bilingual Understanding Translation (IBUT) method based on the cross-lingual capabilities of LLMs and the dual characteristics of translation tasks. The cross-lingual capability of LLMs enables the generation of contextual understanding for both the source and target languages separately. Furthermore, the dual characteristics allow IBUT to generate effective cross-lingual feedback, iteratively refining contextual understanding, thereby reducing errors and improving translation performance. Experimental results showed that the proposed IBUT outperforms several strong comparison methods, especially being generalized to multiple domains (e.g., news, commonsense, and cultural translation benchmarks).
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in general translation tasks. However, the increasing demand for high-quality translations that are not only adequate but also fluent and elegant. To assess the extent to which current LLMs can meet these demands, we introduce a suitable benchmark for translating classical Chinese poetry into English. This task requires not only adequacy in translating culturally and historically significant content but also a strict adherence to linguistic fluency and poetic elegance. Our study reveals that existing LLMs fall short of this task. To address these issues, we propose RAT, a \textbf{R}etrieval-\textbf{A}ugmented machine \textbf{T}ranslation method that enhances the translation process by incorporating knowledge related to classical poetry. Additionally, we propose an automatic evaluation metric based on GPT-4, which better assesses translation quality in terms of adequacy, fluency, and elegance, overcoming the limitations of traditional metrics. Our dataset and code will be made available.
Abstract:Recently, large language models (LLMs) enhanced by self-reflection have achieved promising performance on machine translation. The key idea is guiding LLMs to generate translation with human-like feedback. However, existing self-reflection methods lack effective feedback information, limiting the translation performance. To address this, we introduce a DUAL-REFLECT framework, leveraging the dual learning of translation tasks to provide effective feedback, thereby enhancing the models' self-reflective abilities and improving translation performance. The application of this method across various translation tasks has proven its effectiveness in improving translation accuracy and eliminating ambiguities, especially in translation tasks with low-resource language pairs.