Translating the Translator: Decomposing the Cost of English-Forced Inter-Agent Communication

📅 2026-09-14
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过比较原生语言与强制英语沟通的多代理架构,发现强制使用英语降低了准确性,并建议在源和目标语言差异大时采用原生语言路由。
📝 Abstract
Multi-agent LLM architectures, such as LangChain and AutoGen, largely assume English as the lingua franca for internal inter-agent communication, even when the end-user task is non-English. We fill this gap by evaluating a two-agent extraction-answer core, with an additional back-translation agent in the English-forced condition, across four typologically diverse languages (Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic; n = 300 per language) using the Aya-23-8B model. We compare a native-language pipeline to an English-forced one (which incorporates a final back-translation step from English to the user's language). We discover a statistically significant English-Forcing Tax (surviving a strict Bonferroni correction) that isolates the cost of English routing from general multi-agent orchestration overhead. Forcing inter-agent communication through English reduces Exact Match accuracy by 13.0 percentage points (Spanish) up to 30.6 percentage points (Hindi) compared to native-language multi-agent execution. Using chrF scores as a diagnostic measure of English-reference lexical overlap, we find that lower overlap is strongly associated with pipeline failure, consistent with translation loss being an important contributor to the observed performance drop. These findings suggest a compelling case for native-language routing in agent frameworks when the source and target languages are typologically distant, reducing a compounding translation tax.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

multi-agent LLM
inter-agent communication
English-forcing
translation loss
typologically diverse languages
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

English-Forcing Tax
back-translation agent
typologically diverse languages
native-language routing
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