LaTeXTrans: Structured LaTeX Translation

• LaTeXTrans is a structured translation system that decomposes LaTeX documents into translatable units while preserving intricate commands and environments.
• It employs a multi-agent pipeline with parsing, translation, iterative validation, and generation phases to maintain both semantic accuracy and document integrity.
• Experimental evaluations demonstrate that LaTeXTrans outperforms traditional MT systems by significantly reducing format errors and ensuring compilability.

LaTeXTrans is a structured translation system for LaTeX documents, implementing a collaborative multi-agent approach to address the complexities inherent in translating academic and scientific texts where LaTeX markup is heavily interleaved with domain-specific syntax such as mathematical equations, tables, cross-references, and figures. Unlike general-domain MT systems, which commonly fail to preserve structural fidelity and format integrity in such documents, LaTeXTrans is architected to achieve translation accuracy without sacrificing semantic content or compilability (Zhu et al., 26 Aug 2025).

1. System Architecture and Agent Roles

LaTeXTrans is built as a multi-agent system, partitioned into three key modules—each populated with dedicated functional agents:

• Parser Module: Decomposes the input LaTeX document into translation-suitable units by employing placeholder substitution and dynamic syntax filtering. All LaTeX-specific commands, environments (mathematical or tabular), and other non-translatable segments are replaced with placeholders at this stage.
  • The Filter agent (LLM-powered) provides a binary annotation to each extracted environment, dictating translatability.
• Translation Module: Comprises four coordinated agents:
  • Translator: Converts isolated natural language fragments into the target language, strictly preserving LaTeX markup, commands, and structure.
  • Validator: Inspects translated content, reporting errors such as mismatched environments, lost cross-references, or structural corruption. Validator and Translator operate in an iterative loop to correct errors observed post-translation.
  • Summarizer: Aggregates information on previously translated sections to supply essential context for ambiguous language, supporting coherence and contextual accuracy.
  • Terminology Extractor: Maintains a dynamic, document-local bilingual terminology dictionary, extracting and aligning domain term pairs to ensure consistent term usage.
• Generation Module: The Generator agent reconstructs the final translated document by reinserting preserved LaTeX constructs from the parsed source. The output is a syntactically complete and compilable LaTeX file.

This agent-based decomposition enables LaTeXTrans to enforce both local translation accuracy (sentence/environment level) and global structural fidelity (document level).

2. Translation Pipeline and Workflow

The translation process is systematically staged:

1. Parsing:
   • The Parser strips all non-translatable LaTeX content, assigns placeholders (<PLACEHOLDER_ENV_...>), and segments the remaining input into context-aware translation units at both environment and sentence granularity.
   • The Filter, using an LLM, identifies which environments require translation or should be skipped.
2. Translation:
   • The Translator employs both context—supplied via running document summaries from the Summarizer—and an evolving bilingual dictionary from the Terminology Extractor, outputting a translated unit that rigidly maintains the original LaTeX structural syntax (e.g., commands, environments, labels, cross-references).
   • LaTeX commands and environments are explicitly excluded from translation, ensuring format invariance.
3. Iterative Validation and Correction:
   • The translated units are checked by the Validator, which generates a report on formatting or structure errors and non-compilable output.
   • Errors are iteratively corrected in a feedback loop with the Translator, ensuring that the translation after each cycle moves toward a fully compilable, structurally accurate target document.
4. Generation:
   • The Generator reconstructs the final LaTeX document by reintegrating all original LaTeX-specific segments at their placeholder positions within the translated text.
   • Compilation of the final product (using pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX) is performed for end-to-end validation of both content and structure.

This controlled process, especially the iterative Translator–Validator loop supported by contextual and domain-term tracking, reliably preserves both typographical and semantic features.

3. Experimental Evaluation and Structural Fidelity

Experimental results on English-to-Chinese and English-to-Japanese translation tasks with a dataset of 50 arXiv paper LaTeX sources demonstrate that LaTeXTrans achieves superior translation quality and format preservation:

• Translation Quality:
  • Assessed with COMETkiwi and a custom LLM-derived score factoring faithfulness, fluency, and coherence, LaTeXTrans outperformed established baselines (e.g., NiuTrans, Google Translate, and other LLM-based systems).
• Structural Consistency:
  • Measured by a Format Consistency Score (FC-score), defined as:

  $$\text{FC-score} = S_0 - \alpha N_e - \beta N_w + \gamma C$$

  where $S_0$ is the starting score, $N_e$ and $N_w$ are the counts of errors and warnings, and $C$ indicates successful compilation. - LaTeXTrans consistently preserved LaTeX-specific elements (labels, mathematical commands, environment nesting) at higher rates than competing systems and ensured output was compilable. - Placeholder substitution and reinsertion, alongside context-preservation and iterative correction, led to significant reductions in translation-induced format errors and document breakage.

• Translation Cost:

  • Despite the multi-agent complexity, translation cost did not increase substantially compared to traditional MT workflows.

4. Technical Features and Design Specifics

LaTeXTrans implements several core technical strategies:

• Placeholder Substitution: Critical environments and commands are replaced with placeholders to eliminate accidental translation corruption and to localize natural language processing only to human-readable sections.
• Prompt Templates for Agents: Agents are instructed through explicit prompts (provided in the system) that detail which elements must be left unchanged—for example, “Do not translate LaTeX commands such as \label{}, \cite{}, or mathematical environment beginnings/endings.”
• Term Alignment: The Terminology Extractor agent dynamically builds an in-document bilingual glossary, ensuring domain-specific terminology consistency—a frequent source of translation drift in technical documentation.
• Validator–Translator Loop: Error reports for LaTeX markup loss, structural inconsistencies, or failed compilations are systematically used to correct and retranslate problematic segments until validation passes.
• Compilation as Validation: Reassembly and successful compilation serve as an ultimate correctness check, blending structural and functional acceptance.

5. Application Domains and Use Cases

LaTeXTrans is particularly suited for academic domains and professional technical communication requiring both translation and strict format preservation:

• Multilingual Academic Publishing: Enables accurate translation of research papers, theses, and technical reports between languages, retaining cross-references, equations, and LaTeX formatting.
• Assisting Non-Native Authors: Supports non-native English speakers (and reciprocally, non-English academic communities) by providing high-fidelity translated templates and preserving scientific terminology.
• Document Editing Pipelines: Potential for integration with document editors or as backend infrastructure for translation enhancement platforms requiring robust, automated format-preserving LaTeX translation.
• Cross-Language Dissemination of Legacy Documents: Facilitates extending the academic reach of historical LaTeX documents by converting them into new languages without compromising structure.

6. Comparison to MT Baselines and Related Tools

Unlike general-purpose MT tools and even LLM-based translators—which often mishandle LaTeX’s nested syntax, mis-translate commands, or break document compilability—LaTeXTrans achieves improved accuracy by:

• Enforcing isolation of LaTeX-specific elements.
• Using iterative error-driven refinement with structure-aware validation.
• Integrating a live term dictionary for technical language stability.
• Demonstrating, via empirical metrics (COMETkiwi, FC-score), that output retains both semantic and typographical feature fidelity when benchmarked against domain-representative evaluation sets.

A key result is that traditional MT outputs often render non-compilable or semantically corrupted documents, whereas LaTeXTrans reliably preserves format, ensures error-free compilation, and minimizes translation drift in technical domains (Zhu et al., 26 Aug 2025).

7. Implications and Prospects

LaTeXTrans introduces a paradigm for MT workflows handling structured, format-intensive documents. By integrating parsing, context management, terminology alignment, structural validation, and guided reassembly, it sets a standard for complex document translation that could inform future developments in both academic and industrial publishing pipelines. The agent-based approach, iterative correction with explicit structure validation, and modular design suggest applicability for further adaptation to other code-like or markup-centric languages encountered in scientific communication.

A plausible implication is that the LaTeXTrans architecture could be generalized to serve as a backbone for translation of other domain-specific, markup-heavy formats where structural integrity is a prerequisite for usability or downstream processing.