CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24456v1
• Date: Fri, 30 May 2025 10:42:44 GMT
• Title: CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation
• Authors: Emilio Villa-Cueva, Sholpan Bolatzhanova, Diana Turmakhan, Kareem Elzeky, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Alham Fikri Aji, Israel Abebe Azime, Jinheon Baek, Frederico Belcavello, Fermin Cristobal, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Mary Dabre, Raj Dabre, Toqeer Ehsan, Naome A Etori, Fauzan Farooqui, Jiahui Geng, Guido Ivetta, Thanmay Jayakumar, Soyeong Jeong, Zheng Wei Lim, Aishik Mandal, Sofia Martinelli, Mihail Minkov Mihaylov, Daniil Orel, Aniket Pramanick, Sukannya Purkayastha, Israfel Salazar, Haiyue Song, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Injy Hamed, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Thamar Solorio,
• Abstract summary: We introduce CaMMT, a benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages.<n>We find that visual context generally improves translation quality, especially in handling Culturally-Specific Items (CSIs) and correct gender usage.
• Score: 25.213316704661352
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural context in multimodal translation. We introduce CaMMT, a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate five Vision Language Models (VLMs) in text-only and text+image settings. Through automatic and human evaluations, we find that visual context generally improves translation quality, especially in handling Culturally-Specific Items (CSIs), disambiguation, and correct gender usage. By releasing CaMMT, we aim to support broader efforts in building and evaluating multimodal translation systems that are better aligned with cultural nuance and regional variation.

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