# Bridging the Linguistic Divide: A Survey on Leveraging Large Language Models for Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01919 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01919/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 103 of its 170 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 103)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Preference Optimization: Pushing the Boundaries of LLM Performance in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08417/) (2024)
- [GPTScore: Evaluate as You Desire](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04166/) (2023)
- [How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09210/) (2023)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07791/) (2024)
- [xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10482/) (2023)
- [Prompting Large Language Model for Machine Translation: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07069/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12148/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning with Reward Models: An Analytical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01925/) (2025)
- [Injecting Knowledge Graphs into Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07554/) (2025)
- [Culture-Aware Machine Translation in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24361/) (2026)
- [One Model to Translate Them All? A Journey to Mount Doom for Multilingual Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02881/) (2026)
- [LaTeXTrans: Structured LaTeX Translation with Multi-Agent Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18791/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Sentence: A Survey on Context-Aware Machine Translation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07583/) (2025)
- [Beyond Scalar Scores: Reinforcement Learning for Error-Aware Quality Estimation of Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08600/) (2026)
- [All In Good Time: Causality-Aware Framework for LLM-Based Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30416/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping machine translation (MT), particularly by introducing instruction-following, in-context learning, and preference-based alignment into what has traditionally been a supervised encoder-decoder paradigm. This survey provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of how LLMs are being leveraged for MT across data regimes, languages, and application settings. We systematically analyze prompting-based methods, parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning strategies, synthetic data generation, preference-based optimization, and reinforcement learning with human and weakly supervised feedback. Special attention is given to low-resource translation, where we examine the roles of synthetic data quality, diversity, and preference signals, as well as the limitations of current RLHF pipelines. We further review recent advances in Mixture-of-Experts models, MT-focused LLMs, and multilingual alignment, highlighting trade-offs between scalability, specialization, and accessibility. Beyond sentence-level translation, we survey emerging document-level and discourse-aware MT methods with LLMs, showing that most approaches extend sentence-level pipelines through structured context selection, post-editing, or reranking rather than requiring fundamentally new data regimes or architectures. Finally, we discuss LLM-based evaluation, its strengths and biases, and its role alongside learned metrics. Overall, this survey positions LLM-based MT as an evolution of traditional MT systems, where gains increasingly depend on data quality, preference alignment, and context utilization rather than scale alone, and outlines open challenges for building robust, inclusive, and controllable translation systems.