Agentic AI Translate: An Agentic Translator Prototype for Translation as Communication Design

TL;DR

Agentic AI Translate introduces a novel four-stage agentic cycle for translation, emphasizing communication design over text conversion, with an interactive specification phase and evidence-grounded verification.

Contribution

The paper presents a conceptual and architectural prototype that operationalizes translation as communication design in the era of generative AI, moving beyond traditional text-in/text-out models.

Findings

Prototype operationalizes a four-stage agentic cycle for translation.

Incorporates interactive specification with structured briefs based on translation theory.

Uses evidence-grounded scoring and memory for coherence in translation.

Abstract

We present Agentic AI Translate, an agentic translator prototype that operationalises the thesis of Yamada (forthcoming) -- that the metalanguage of Translation Studies has become an instruction code for generative AI. The system replaces the dominant text-in / text-out paradigm of machine translation with a four-stage agentic cycle (Identify -> Prompt -> Generate -> Verify), preceded by an interactive specification phase in which the user composes -- through model-assisted dialogue -- a structured translation brief grounded in skopos theory, register, audience, and genre conventions. The verification stage adopts the GEMBA-MQM error-span protocol (Kocmi & Federmann, 2023) for evidence-grounded scoring, and document-level coherence is preserved through a DelTA-lite memory of proper nouns and a running bilingual summary, after Wang et al. (2025). We describe the philosophical motivation, the architectural commitments, the four reference-material categories the system consumes, and the principal design tensions the architecture makes explicit. Empirical validation is left for future work; the contribution here is conceptual and architectural -- an executable embodiment of the position that translation in the GenAI era is communication design, not text conversion.