Worlds Within Words: Translating Culture in Ancient Chinese Texts with Multi-Agent Coordination

arXiv:2606.01276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based machine translation has advanced cross-cultural communication, yet it still struggles with culture-loaded words (CLWs) in ancient Chinese texts. The challenge extends beyond lexical alignment to deciding when and how culture-dependent knowledge should be explicated for readers lacking relevant background. Literal translation often preserves surface forms while missing underlying concepts, whereas over-explicitation harms conciseness and readability. To address this problem, we formulate CLW translation as a selective explicitation task and propose extbf{MACAT}, a extbf{M}ulti-extbf{A}gent extbf{C}ulture-extbf{A}ware extbf{T}ranslation framework that dynamically identifies culturally salient phrases and injects concise explanatory knowledge when necessary. MACAT further incorporates a quality-aware reranking module for candidate selection and a multi-round evaluation agent that assesses translations across terminological precision, readability, fidelity, cultural preservation, and cultural explicitation. Experiments on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) classics and the extit{Analects} show that, under a unified GPT-5.4 evaluation setting, MACAT consistently outperforms both the backbone model and general-purpose MT baselines on 100 TCM documents and a 20-chapter subset of the extit{Analects}.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-06-02