--- title: "TELÓ: AI-Driven Automatic Subtitling for the Promotion of the Performing Arts — Oliver 2026" description: "Theatre performed in Catalan rarely tours abroad, since few foreign spectators understand the language and traditional surtitling needs a… 4 references." authors: ["Antoni Oliver", "Sílvia Rodríguez Vázquez", "Manel Jiménez"] year: 2026 venue: "Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-2.12/" licence: "CC BY-ND 4.0 (EAMT)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/oliver-2026-telo-ai-driven-automatic-subtitling/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/oliver-2026-telo-ai-driven-automatic-subtitling/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/10/) / TELÓ: AI-Driven Automatic Subtitling for the Promotion of the Performing Arts # TELÓ: AI-Driven Automatic Subtitling for the Promotion of the Performing Arts **Authors:** [Antoni Oliver](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/antoni-oliver/), Sílvia Rodríguez Vázquez and Manel Jiménez · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2) · **Licence:** [CC BY-ND 4.0 (EAMT)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-2.12/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-2.12.pdf) ## Summary Theatre performed in Catalan rarely tours abroad, since few foreign spectators understand the language and traditional surtitling needs a translation prepared in advance plus an operator cueing lines live. The TELÓ project (UOC, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya) proposes an open-source framework that automates this for Catalan, Spanish, English and French in any direction. A cascaded pipeline links four modules: a Transcriber (Whisper, a Catalan-tuned Whisper, or commercial ASR APIs); a Synchronizer that aligns live transcripts with the script, times subtitles and detects improvisation; a Translator based on MTUOC, using NMT or LLMs for scripts and ad-libs; and an Emissor serving per-language streams to phones, tablets, smart glasses or projectors. A local Wi-Fi intranet keeps latency under one second. As a project description, the paper reports no quantitative evaluation: the architecture is built and preliminary tests done, with professional pilots due by August 2026. The work supports internationalisation of minority-language drama and captioning for DHH audiences. ## Key points - **Motivation from sector data:** Catalonia has 787 venues and 13,647 performances per year. Non-verbal shows make up 8.33% of local performances but 60.59% of international tours. Spoken-Catalan shows fall from 60% locally to 12.38% abroad. - **Project details:** reference PLG002/25/000052, running six months (02/02/2026–01/08/2026). It builds on work from the Aina Project and the Grial Research Group. - **First deployment:** a French-language production will be subtitled simultaneously into Catalan and Spanish, which justifies the bidirectional design. - **Interface features:** device-specific font and contrast settings, and a "Theater Mode" with low-emission colours to limit light pollution. Same-language captions serve DHH spectators. - **Release and plans:** code will be published on GitHub under GNU-GPL v.3. Future work covers MT adapted to dramatic registers, better robustness to noise and improvisation, and a possible end-to-end speech-to-text translation model replacing the ASR+NMT cascade. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) · [Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/machine-translation/) Topics: [🔁 Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/machine-translation/) ## Cite Cite as: Antoni Oliver, Sílvia Rodríguez Vázquez and Manel Jiménez. 2026. TELÓ: AI-Driven Automatic Subtitling for the Promotion of the Performing Arts. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2). The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{oliver2026telo, title = {{TELÓ: AI-Driven Automatic Subtitling for the Promotion of the Performing Arts}}, author = {Antoni Oliver, Sílvia Rodríguez Vázquez and Manel Jiménez}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 2)}, year = {2026}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-2.12/} } ``` - [← previous Teaching Machine Translation Technologies with MTUUOC](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/oliver-2026-teaching-machine-translation-technologies-mtuuoc/) - [next → Terminology-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Distillation for Biomedical Neural Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zafar-2026-terminology-aware-retrieval-augmented-knowledge/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/10/) ## References 4 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Hernández Mena, Carlos Daniel, Carme Armen-tano Oller, Sarah Solito, and Baybars Külebi. 2024. 3catparla: A new open-source corpus of broadcast TV in Catalan for automatic speech recognition. In Proc. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Herna%CC%81ndez+Mena%2C+Carlos+Daniel%2C+Carme+Armen%2Dtano+Oller%2C+Sarah+Solito%2C+and+Baybars+Ku%CC%88lebi%2E+2024%2E+3catparla%3A+A+new+open%2Dsource+corpus+of+broadcast+TV+in+Catalan+for+automatic+speech+recognition%2E+In+Pro) 2. IberSPEECH 2024, pages 176–180. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=IberSPEECH+2024%2C+pages+176%E2%80%93180%2E) 3. Oliver, Antoni. 2025. MTUOC server: integrating several NMT and LLMs into professional translation workflows. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 2, pages 81–82. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Oliver%2C+Antoni%2E+2025%2E+MTUOC+server%3A+integrating+several+NMT+and+LLMs+into+professional+translation+workflows%2E+In+Proceedings+of+Machine+Translation+Summit+XX%3A+Volume+2%2C+pages+81%E2%80%9382%2E) 4. Radford, Alec, Jong Wook Kim, Tao Xu, Greg Brockman, Christine McLeavey, and Ilya Sutskever. 2023. Robust speech recognition via large-scale weak supervision. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 28492– 28518. [https://telouoc.github.io/](https://telouoc.github.io/) [↗](https://telouoc.github.io/) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/radford-2022-robust-speech-recognition-large-scale/)