A comprehensive overview of LLM-based approaches for machine translation

Abstract

Statistical machine translation (SMT) used parallel corpora and statistical models, to identify translation patterns and probabilities. Although this method had advantages, it had trouble with idiomatic expressions, context-specific subtleties, and intricate linguistic structures. The subsequent introduction of deep neural networks such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTMs), transformers with attention mechanisms, and the emergence of large language model (LLM) frameworks has marked a paradigm shift in machine translation in recent years and has entirely replaced the traditional statistical approaches. The LLMs are able to capture complex language patterns, semantics, and context because they have been trained on enormous volumes of text data. Our study summarizes the most significant contributions in the literature related to LLM prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation, improved transformer variants for faster translation, multilingual LLMs, and quality estimation with LLMs. This new research direction guides the development of more efficient and innovative solutions to address the current challenges of LLMs, including hallucinations, translation bias, information leakage, and inaccuracy due to language inconsistencies.