Empowering Video Translation using Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract

Recent developments in video translation have further enhanced cross-lingual access to video content, with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) playing an increasingly important supporting role. With strong multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation capabilities, MLLMs-based video translation systems are overcoming the limitations of traditional cascaded pipelines that separately handle automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech and lip synchronization. These MLLM-powered approaches not only achieve competitive or superior translation quality, but also demonstrate stronger robustness in zero-shot settings and multi-speaker scenarios, while jointly modeling semantic fidelity, timing, speaker identity, and emotional consistency. However, despite the rapid progress of MLLMs and extensive surveys on general video-language understanding, a focused and systematic review of how MLLMs empower video translation tasks is still lacking. To fill this gap, we provide the first comprehensive overview of MLLMs-based video translation, organized around a three-role taxonomy: 1) Semantic Reasoner, which characterizes how MLLMs perform video understanding, temporal reasoning, and multimodal fusion; 2) Expressive Performer, which analyzes LLM-driven and LLM-augmented techniques for expressive, controllable speech generation; and 3) Visual Synthesizer, which examines different types of video generators for high-fidelity lip-sync and visual alignment. Finally, we discuss open challenges in video understanding, temporal modeling, and multimodal alignment, and outline promising future research directions for MLLMs-powered video translation.