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

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 the public MuSC benchmark, SMART obtains the best model result across all four language pairs and also achieves the best human-evaluation result, with an overall score of 4.50/5.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2609.38660 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.38660v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.38660 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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