# DRT: Deep Reasoning Translation via Long Chain-of-Thought

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17498/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [CometKiwi: IST-Unbabel 2022 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06243/) (2022)
- [BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08209/) (2021)
- [Marco-o1: Towards Open Reasoning Models for Open-Ended Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14405/) (2024)
- [O1 Replication Journey: A Strategic Progress Report -- Part 1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18982/) (2024)
- [O1 Replication Journey -- Part 2: Surpassing O1-preview through Simple Distillation, Big Progress or Bitter Lesson?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16489/) (2024)
- [Large language models effectively leverage document-level context for literary translation, but critical errors persist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03245/) (2023)
- [Best-Worst Scaling More Reliable than Rating Scales: A Case Study on Sentiment Intensity Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01765/) (2017)
- [o1-Coder: an o1 Replication for Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00154/) (2024)
- [Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14250/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models for NLG Evaluation: Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07103/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [RedStar: Does Scaling Long-CoT Data Unlock Better Slow-Reasoning Systems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11284/) (2025)
- [R1-T1: Fully Incentivizing Translation Capability in LLMs via Reasoning Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19735/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Slow Thinking-based Reasoning LLMs using Reinforced Learning and Inference-time Scaling Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02665/) (2025)
- [New Trends for Modern Machine Translation with Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10351/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models with Self-Consistency-Based Hallucination Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09440/) (2025)
- [SSR-Zero: Simple Self-Rewarding Reinforcement Learning for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16637/) (2025)
- [Long Is More Important Than Difficult for Training Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18069/) (2025)
- [Beyond Literal Mapping: Benchmarking and Improving Non-Literal Translation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07338/) (2026)
- [How Well Do Large Reasoning Models Translate? A Comprehensive Evaluation for Multi-Domain Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19987/) (2025)
- [TACTIC: Translation Agents with Cognitive-Theoretic Interactive Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08403/) (2025)
- [NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07003/) (2025)
- [NeoAMT: Neologism-Aware Agentic Machine Translation with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03790/) (2026)
- [LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18490/) (2026)
- [GRRM: Group Relative Reward Modeling for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14028/) (2026)
- [Incentivizing Parametric Knowledge via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Cross-Cultural Entity Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16881/) (2026)
- [Loong: A Human-Like Long Document Translation Agent with Observe-and-Act Adaptive Context Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30274/) (2026)
- [AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14674/) (2026)
- [STAR : Sentence Translation Alignment Rate for Document-to-Document Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27161/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Recursive Thinking of LLMs: Alignment via Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06009/) (2025)
- [Functionality-Oriented LLM Merging on the Fisher--Rao Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04972/) (2026)
- [Should We be Pedantic About Reasoning Errors in Machine Translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09890/) (2026)
- [Better Literary Translation: A Multi-Aspect Data Generation and LLM Training Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05924/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)
- [Translation with Thought: Difficulty-Adaptive Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Domain Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29287/) (2026)
- [PAMT: Process-Aligned Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Domain Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03077/) (2026)
- [When Does Reasoning Help in Machine Translation? A Hierarchical Analysis of LRM Reasoning Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21247/) (2026)
- [Breaking Babel: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent System for Long-Form Subtitle Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38660/) (2026)
- [Retrieve What Helps, Only When It Helps: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Selective Retrieval-Augmented Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19528/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, O1-like models have emerged as representative examples, illustrating the effectiveness of long chain-of-thought (CoT) in reasoning tasks such as math and coding tasks. In this paper, we introduce DRT, an attempt to bring the success of long CoT to neural machine translation (MT). Specifically, in view of the literature books that might involve similes and metaphors, translating these texts to a target language is very difficult in practice due to cultural differences. In such cases, literal translation often fails to convey the intended meaning effectively. Even for professional human translators, considerable thought must be given to preserving semantics throughout the translation process. To simulate LLMs' long thought ability in MT, we first mine sentences containing similes or metaphors from existing literature books, and then develop a multi-agent framework to translate these sentences via long thought. In the multi-agent framework, a translator is used to iteratively translate the source sentence under the suggestions provided by an advisor. To ensure the effectiveness of the long thoughts, an evaluator is also employed to quantify the translation quality in each round. In this way, we collect tens of thousands of long-thought MT data, which is used to train our DRT. Using Qwen2.5 and LLama-3.1 as the backbones, DRT models can learn the thought process during machine translation, and outperform vanilla LLMs as well as LLMs which are simply fine-tuning on the paired sentences without long thought, showing its effectiveness. The synthesized data and model checkpoints are released at https://github.com/krystalan/DRT.