CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

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 et al. (14 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Translating 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 marking. By releasing CaMMT, our objective is to support broader efforts to build and evaluate multimodal translation systems that are better aligned with cultural nuance and regional variations.