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arXiv · 2609.38660

Breaking Babel: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent System for Long-Form Subtitle Translation

Haibo Jin·Xinjie Li·Najmeh Sadoughi·Yang Liu·Yibo Wang·Zhu Liu·Yuzong Liu
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Abstract

Long-form subtitle translation requires reasoning over discourse and cultural context spanning episodes or entire series, while maintaining consistent terminology and style. Existing single-LLM methods are largely sentence-level, and multi-agent systems often use static workflows that do not adapt to scene complexity or production context. We propose SMART, a Self-evolving Multi-Agent system for long-foRm subtitle Translation. During test-time training, SMART builds persistent series-level memory and translates a subset of sentences through a dynamic router and Mixture-of-Agents layer with tools for terminology verification, subtitle constraint validation, and contextual retrieval. A judge-refiner loop scores candidates and uses textual critiques to update agent prompts and routing policies without retraining the underlying LLMs. During test-time inference, the evolved configuration translates the remaining series. We also introduce Subtitle Arena, covering 14 genres, 2--198 episodes per series, production years 1959--2023, and 15 target locales, together with SubMQM, a subtitle-adapted MQM framework with seven dimensions and 19 error categories. SMART achieves the best overall MQM score in all 15 Subtitle Arena directions, reducing average penalty by 6.9% over the strongest competing agent system. On a public benchmark, MuSC, SMART obtains the best model result across all 4 language pairs. SMART also achieves the best result in human evaluation with an overall score of 4.50/5.

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Haibo Jin, Xinjie Li, Najmeh Sadoughi, Yang Liu, Yibo Wang, Zhu Liu, Yuzong Liu. 2026-10-01. Breaking Babel: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent System for Long-Form Subtitle Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38660

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