Tarun Chintada
Author directory2026
Towards Visually-Guided Movie Subtitle Translation for Indic Languages
Tarun Chintada | Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh | Asif Ekbal
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)
Tarun Chintada | Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh | Asif Ekbal
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)
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