arXiv Computation and Language By Yuxiang Liu, Jiaming Luo, Eleftheria Briakou, Colin Cherry

When Does Reasoning Help in Machine Translation? A Hierarchical Analysis of LRM Reasoning Traces

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The paper investigates when intermediate reasoning traces benefit machine translation by examining models, languages, domains, and datasets. It finds that the optimal reasoning language depends on the model, reasoning length has a non‑monotonic effect on quality, and traces display recurring functional patterns. Using Hierarchical Meta‑Summarization, the authors uncover a shared structure of understanding/planning, translating/drafting, and refining/verifying, while also noting domain‑specific variations, suggesting that reasoning should be tailored rather than uniformly applied.

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