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Scaling Model and Data for Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models

Yuzhe Shang, Pengzhi Gao, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Jinsong Su · Feb 12, 2026 · Citations: 0

Abstract

Open large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated improving multilingual capabilities in recent years. In this paper, we present a study of open LLMs for multilingual machine translation (MT) across a range of languages, and investigate the effects of model scaling and data scaling when adapting open LLMs to multilingual MT through continual pretraining and instruction finetuning. Based on the Gemma3 model family, we develop MiLMMT-46, which achieves top-tier multilingual translation performance across 46 languages. Extensive experiments show that MiLMMT-46 consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including Seed-X, HY-MT-1.5, and TranslateGemma, and achieves competitive performance with strong proprietary systems such as Google Translate and Gemini 3 Pro. Models are released at https://huggingface.co/collections/xiaomi-research/milmmt-46. Codes are released at https://github.com/xiaomi-research/gemmax.

Human Data Lens

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Unknown
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: Coding, Multilingual

Evaluation Lens

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Confidence: 0.30
  • Flags: low_signal, possible_false_positive

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Open large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated improving multilingual capabilities in recent years.
  • In this paper, we present a study of open LLMs for multilingual machine translation (MT) across a range of languages, and investigate the effects of model scaling and data scaling when adapting open LLMs to multilingual MT through continual
  • Based on the Gemma3 model family, we develop MiLMMT-46, which achieves top-tier multilingual translation performance across 46 languages.

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