Code translation is an essential task in software migration, multilingual development, and system refactoring. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in this task. However, prior studies have highlighted that LLMs often struggle with domain-specific code, particularly in resolving cross-lingual API mappings. To tackle this challenge, we propose ApiRAT, a novel code translation method that integrates multi-source API knowledge. ApiRAT employs three API knowledge augmentation techniques, including API sequence retrieval, API sequence back-translation, and API mapping, to guide LLMs to translating code, ensuring both the correct structure of API sequences and the accurate usage of individual APIs. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, CodeNet and AVATAR, indicate that ApiRAT significantly surpasses existing LLM-based methods, achieving improvements in computational accuracy ranging from 4% to 15.1%. Additionally, our evaluation across different LLMs showcases the generalizability of ApiRAT. An ablation study further confirms the individual contributions of each API knowledge component, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.

In recent years, neural code translation has gained increasing attention. While most of the research focuses on improving model architectures and training processes, we notice that the evaluation process and benchmark for code translation models are severely limited: they primarily treat source code as natural languages and provide a holistic accuracy score while disregarding the full spectrum of model capabilities across different translation types and complexity. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation of four state-of-the-art models and analyze in-depth the advantages and limitations of three existing benchmarks. Based on the empirical results, we develop a taxonomy that categorizes code translation tasks into four primary types according to their complexity and knowledge dependence: token level (type 1), syntactic level (type 2), library level (type 3), and algorithm level (type 4). We then conduct a thorough analysis of how existing approaches perform across these four categories. Our findings indicate that while state-of-the-art code translation models excel in type-1 and type-2 translations, they struggle with knowledge-dependent ones such as type-3 and type-4. Existing benchmarks are biased towards trivial translations, such as keyword mapping. To overcome these limitations, we construct G-TransEval, a new benchmark by manually curating type-3 and type-4 translation pairs and unit test cases. Results on our new benchmark suggest that G-TransEval can exhibit more comprehensive and finer-grained capability of code translation models and thus provide a more rigorous evaluation. Our studies also provide more insightful findings and suggestions for future research, such as building type-3 and type-4 training data and ensembling multiple pretraining approaches.

As software systems continue to grow in complexity and scale, deploying and delivering them becomes increasingly difficult. In this work, we develop DeployQA, a novel QA bot that automatically answers software deployment questions over user manuals and Stack Overflow posts. DeployQA is built upon RoBERTa. To bridge the gap between natural language and the domain of software deployment, we propose three adaptations in terms of vocabulary, pre-training, and fine-tuning, respectively. We evaluate our approach on our constructed DeQuAD dataset. The results show that DeployQA remarkably outperforms baseline methods by leveraging the three domain adaptation strategies.