TransGoT: Structured Graph-of-Thoughts Reasoning for Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Machine translation with large language models has recently attracted growing attention due to its flexibility and strong zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. However, most prompt-based LLM translation methods rely on linear generation or shallow self-refinement, implicitly committing to a single reasoning path. Such designs are brittle when translating long and syntactically complex sources, where reliable translation often requires structured planning and hypothesis exploration. In this paper, we propose TransGoT, a novel machine translation framework inspired by the graph-of-thoughts paradigm, which formulates translation as a structured, multi-stage reasoning process over a graph of intermediate thoughts. TransGoT explicitly decomposes translation into constraint identification, draft generation, and culture- and style-aware refinement, enabling systematic exploration and aggregation of alternative translation hypotheses. To better adapt graph-based reasoning to translation, we design two key mechanisms: (1) Uncertainty-driven thought transformation. Unlike general reasoning tasks, translation uncertainty is often localized and unevenly distributed across tokens, making holistic regeneration inefficient. We therefore design uncertainty-driven thought transformation, which leverages model-internal confidence signals to guide targeted token-level revision; (2) Dispersion-adaptive thought scoring. It emphasizes evaluation criteria with stronger inter-candidate variance to enable robust multi-criteria thought selection. We evaluate TransGoT on the WMT22 benchmarks and experimental results demonstrate that TransGoT consistently outperforms strong LLM-based translation baselines, validating the effectiveness of structured graph-based reasoning for machine translation.