TroubleshootingAnswered

Why does Claude summarize and shorten translations halfway through long documents?

Anonymous7/17/2026· Views 105

I asked Claude to translate a chapter-length piece and noticed it translates the first part sentence by sentence, but once it gets past the halfway point, it starts condensing two or three sentences into one like it's summarizing instead of translating. It does the same thing even when I split it up and do it in chunks. Is this just how it works, or is there a way to prompt it so it doesn't do this?

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첫째StaffLv.67/17/2026

Hello, this is an admin response. To sum it up, it's less about token limits and more a tendency that appears when generating long text all at once, and you can reduce it significantly by adjusting your prompt. First, let me explain the cause. Within a single request, there are cases where it's not always able to faithfully translate very long content sentence by sentence all the way through, and instead tends to compress and convey only the essence as it goes further. You mentioned it's the same even when you break it up—this could be because the units you divided are still large, or the same conversation continues at length and the priority of the guidelines given earlier becomes blurred. The exact internal cause of this phenomenon hasn't been officially explained by Anthropic, so it's uncertain. I recommend some practical tips. 1. Break chapters into much smaller units (around 3-5 paragraphs) and request them. It's clearly more effective than dividing into large chunks. 2. Explicitly include a prohibition on abbreviation in your prompt. For example: "Don't summarize—translate every sentence 1-to-1. Match the number of sentences in the original and translation." 3. After translation is complete, ask to check if the number of paragraphs and sentences match between the original and translation. If you request one more review, you can immediately find any missing parts. 4. If it still repeats, try starting a new conversation for each paragraph group. The longer a single conversation gets, the guidelines set earlier can be pushed aside. Practical prompts for translating with Claude and limitations with long documents are detailed in the guide below. https://usingclaude.com/ko/guides/features/claude-translation-guide