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arXiv · 2605.11993

Towards Visually-Guided Movie Subtitle Translation for Indic Languages

Abstract

Movie subtitle translation is inherently multimodal, yet text-only systems often miss visual cues needed to convey emotion, action, and social nuance, especially for low-resource Indic languages (English to Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada). We present a case study on five full-length films and compare two lightweight visual grounding strategies: structured attribute summaries from a 5-minute sliding window and free-text summaries of inter-subtitle visual gaps. Our analysis shows that temporal misalignment between subtitles and frames is a major obstacle in long-form video, often rendering indiscriminate visual grounding ineffective. However, oracle selective grounding, which replaces only the lowest-quality 20-30\% of baseline segments with visual-enhanced outputs, consistently improves COMET over the text-only baseline while requiring far less visual processing. Among the two approaches, coarse attribute-based visual context summarization is more robust, capturing scene-level emotion and contextual subtle cues that text alone often misses

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Tarun Chintada, Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh, Asif Ekbal. 2026-05-12. Towards Visually-Guided Movie Subtitle Translation for Indic Languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11993

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