Comparative Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems on Images with Text

Abstract: This work presents a comparative evaluation of machine translation systems applied to images containing textual information, a task that lies at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. The study compares three main paradigms: modular pipelines that separate text detection, recognition, and translation; multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) capable of processing both image and text jointly; and an end-to-end model, Translatotron-V, which directly generates translated images. The modular systems employ state-of-the-art OCR (docTR) combined with multilingual LLMs such as Llama and EuroLLM, while the evaluated MLLMs include different configurations of Gemini 2.5. Experiments were conducted on parallel multilingual datasets covering multiple language pairs, with evaluation based on BLEU, chrF, and TER metrics. The results show that modular pipelines outperform the end-to-end approach, while MLLMs achieve the best overall performance, demonstrating superior flexibility and contextual understanding. These findings underscore the effectiveness of multi-modal reasoning for image-to-text translation and provide a solid foundation for future research on integrating visual understanding and language generation in multilingual settings.