“In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) havedemonstrated exceptional capabilities across a variety of tasks, including question answering,classification, and particularly, natural language understanding. The integration of neural ma-chine translation with LLMs presents significant potential, transforming the paradigms of cross-lingual communication and information exchange. This study investigates the foundational as-pects of LLMs’ translation abilities and identifies effective training methodologies to equip themwith multilingual capacities. We specifically explore the optimal timing for introducing trans-lation capabilities to LLMs via supervised tasks, considering the inherent bilingual nature ofmachine translation. Key questions explored include whether it is more beneficial to integratemultiple languages during the pre-training or supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stages, how varia-tions in language ratios influence LLMs’ translation abilities, and whether longer or shorter textsare more effective for training these models. This research conducts a thorough investigationby training multiple LLMs from scratch with parameter scales in the billions and enhances therobustness of our findings by upgrading the language capabilities of pre-trained open-sourcemodels with parameter scales reaching tens of billions. The aim is to provide a detailed analysisthat elucidates the complexities of augmenting machine translation capabilities within LLMs.”