Separating Syntax from Language: A Mechanistic Account of Translation in Multilingual LLMs
Multilingual large language models (mLLMs) achieve strong performance in machine translation, yet our understanding of the mechanisms by which they transform representations from one language to another remains incomplete. Prior work suggests that translation decomposes into separable processes within an mLLM, where conceptual content is first represented independently, followed by a production into language-specific form. In this work, we show that translation is even more modular than previously assumed and that the output language production in translation processes is actually further separable into a syntax and a surface language process. We construct controlled multilingual datasets...
| Authors | Mikhail Sonkin, Tanja Baeumel, Daniil Gurgurov et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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