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arXiv · 2510.19398

SONAR-SLT: Multilingual Sign Language Translation via Language-Agnostic Sentence Embedding Supervision

Abstract

Sign language translation (SLT) is typically trained with text in a single spoken language, which limits scalability and cross-language generalization. Earlier approaches have replaced gloss supervision with text-based sentence embeddings, but up to now, these remain tied to a specific language and modality. In contrast, here we employ language-agnostic, multimodal embeddings trained on text and speech from multiple languages to supervise SLT, enabling direct multilingual translation. To address data scarcity, we propose a coupled augmentation method that combines multilingual target augmentations (i.e. translations into many languages) with video-level perturbations, improving model robustness. Experiments show consistent BLEURT gains over text-only sentence embedding supervision, with larger improvements in low-resource settings. Our results demonstrate that language-agnostic embedding supervision, combined with coupled augmentation, provides a scalable and semantically robust alternative to traditional SLT training.

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BibTeXRIS

Yasser Hamidullah, Shakib Yazdani, Cennet Oguz, Josef van Genabith, Cristina España-Bonet. 2025-10-22. SONAR-SLT: Multilingual Sign Language Translation via Language-Agnostic Sentence Embedding Supervision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19398

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