Large-scale Pretrained Language Models~(LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown strong abilities in multilingual translations, without being explicitly trained on parallel corpora. It is interesting how the LLMs obtain their ability to carry out translation instructions for different languages. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis by finetuning a multilingual pretrained language model, XGLM-7B, to perform multilingual translation following given instructions. Firstly, we show that the multilingual LLMs have stronger translation abilities than previously demonstrated. For a certain language pair, the performance depends on both the language families and the amount of data used in the pretraining phase. Secondly, we find that LLMs' ability to carry out translation instructions relies on the understanding of translation instruction and the alignment among different languages. With proper enhancement, LLMs could perform the translation task well even for those language pairs unseen during the instruction tuning phase.

本篇论文通过对一个多语种预训练语言模型XGLM-7B进行微调并给出指示进行多语种翻译的实验，展示了预训练语言模型在翻译任务中的较强能力，并发现其翻译能力依赖于对翻译指令的理解和语言之间的对齐，研究结果可启发模型改进。

通过使用翻译指示进行多语言微调，引发大型语言模型的翻译能力