Reasoning about In-Context Samples for Machine-Translation

arXiv:2608.27036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can be trained to perform chain-of-thoughts reasoning in order to improve the reliability of their responses.

In this work, we investigate how explicit reasoning can be leveraged for LLM-Based Machine Translation (MT) with in-context samples.

We introduce a novel fragment-based reasoning framework in which the model first extracts parallel source-target fragments from retrieved similar exemplars, and uses these fragments as intermediate reasoning traces to produce the final translation. To train our model, we distill silver fragments and drafts from a large teacher model.

Our experiments with the Qwen3 model family, over 6 languages, including up to 5 domains per language, demonstrate that fragment-based MT significantly outperforms alternative methods like standard k-shot or basic drafting.