# RepoTransBench: A Real-World Multilingual Benchmark for Repository-Level Code Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17744/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00859/) (2021)
- [Measuring Coding Challenge Competence With APPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09938/) (2021)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [CodeXGLUE: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04664/) (2021)
- [GraphCodeBERT: Pre-training Code Representations with Data Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08366/) (2020)
- [StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2: The Next Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19173/) (2024)
- [CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10297/) (2020)
- [Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06333/) (2021)
- [UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03850/) (2022)
- [CodeGeeX: A Pre-Trained Model for Code Generation with Multilingual Benchmarking on HumanEval-X](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17568/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03511/) (2020)
- [CodeNet: A Large-Scale AI for Code Dataset for Learning a Diversity of Coding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12655/) (2021)
- [SantaCoder: don't reach for the stars!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03988/) (2023)
- [Tree-to-tree Neural Networks for Program Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03691/) (2018)
- [AVATAR: A Parallel Corpus for Java-Python Program Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11590/) (2021)
- [A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings for automated code documentation and code generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02275/) (2017)
- [CodeTransOcean: A Comprehensive Multilingual Benchmark for Code Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04951/) (2023)
- [Exploring and Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Automated Code Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14646/) (2024)
- [XLCoST: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08474/) (2022)
- [What's Wrong with Your Code Generated by Large Language Models? An Extensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06153/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [LongCodeZip: Compress Long Context for Code Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00446/) (2025)
- [SWE-QA: Can Language Models Answer Repository-level Code Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14635/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Benchmarks and Solutions in Software Engineering of LLM-Empowered Agentic System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09721/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Agent Developer Practices in AI Agent Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01939/) (2025)
- [Towards an Understanding of Context Utilization in Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08734/) (2025)
- [EffiReasonTrans: RL-Optimized Reasoning for Code Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18863/) (2025)
- [RepoReasoner: Evaluating Repository-Level Code Reasoning Ability of Long-Context Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25996/) (2026)
- [SWE Refactor Bench: Can Coding Agents Complete a Long-Horizon, Whole-Repository Stack Migration?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23564/) (2026)
- [Skeleton-Guided-Translation: A Benchmarking Framework for Code Repository Translation with Fine-Grained Quality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16050/) (2025)
- [CoreCodeBench: Decoupling Code Intelligence via Fine-Grained Repository-Level Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05281/) (2025)
- [RepoTransAgent: Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Repository-Aware Code Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17720/) (2025)
- [ReCodeAgent: A Multi-agent Workflow for Language-Agnostic Translation and Validation of Large-Scale Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07341/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models for Multilingual Code Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25960/) (2026)
- [SPDZCoder: Combining Expert Knowledge with LLMs for Generating Privacy-Computing Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00363/) (2024)
- [CodePivot: Bootstrapping Multilingual Transpilation in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning without Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18027/) (2026)
- [SWE-Gate: Passing Functional Tests Is Not Enough for Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04167/) (2026)
- [TypyBench: Evaluating LLM Type Inference for Untyped Python Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22086/) (2025)
- [Converted, Not Equivalent: Benchmarking Codebase Conversion via Observational Equivalence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29054/) (2026)
- [Entropy-based Code Adversarial Translation for Real-world Repository Migration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09273/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Critical Token-Aware Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01601/) (2026)
- [Efficient SWE Agent Benchmarking via Trajectory-Aware Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01603/) (2026)
- [ORCA: Evaluating LLMs on Data Science Code Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30749/) (2026)
- [Correct Code, Broken Contributions? SWE-CC: Benchmarking Repository Policy Compliance for Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06193/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Repository-level code translation refers to translating an entire code repository from one programming language to another while preserving the functionality of the source repository. Many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the performance of such code translators. However, previous benchmarks mostly provide fine-grained samples, focusing at either code snippet, function, or file-level code translation. Such benchmarks do not accurately reflect real-world demands, where entire repositories often need to be translated, involving longer code length and more complex functionalities. To address this gap, we propose a new benchmark, named RepoTransBench, which is a real-world multilingual repository-level code translation benchmark featuring 1,897 real-world repository samples across 13 language pairs with automatically executable test suites. Besides, we introduce RepoTransAgent, a general agent framework to perform repository-level code translation. We evaluate both our benchmark's challenges and agent's effectiveness using several methods and backbone LLMs, revealing that repository-level translation remains challenging, where the best-performing method achieves only a 32.8% success rate. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that translation difficulty varies significantly by language pair direction, with dynamic-to-static language translation being much more challenging than the reverse direction (achieving below 10% vs. static-to-dynamic at 45-63%). Finally, we conduct a detailed error analysis and highlight current LLMs' deficiencies in repository-level code translation, which could provide a reference for further improvements. We provide the code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/RepoTransBench.
