PAT (Pragmatic Auto-Translator)

PAT: RAG-based system for whole-document, corpus-informed LLM translation beyond sentence-level paradigm

Researchers introduce PAT (Pragmatic Auto-Translator), a RAG-based system that moves LLM translation beyond sentence-by-sentence processing by pairing user-configured specifications with paragraph-, section-, and document-level examples from a comparable corpus of U.S. English and Latin American Spanish texts. The system targets draft translation for professional verification, aiming to reformulate discourse organization, rhetorical style, and pragmatic norms for the target language context. Evaluation using a customized MQM typology across six automatic translations of generative AI essays found that limited prompting produced no meaningful reformulation, while specifications and corpus-informed approaches showed partial but inconsistent improvement. The work demonstrates LLMs can be nudged toward document-level reformulation but highlights remaining gaps in effectiveness.