We present the University of Florida Gators submission to the AmericasNLP 2026 shared task on cultural image captioning for Indigenous languages. Our two-stage pipeline generates a Spanish intermediate caption with Qwen2.5-VL, then produces the target-language caption using retrieval-augmented many-shot prompting with Gemini 2.5 Flash. We achieve 164.1%, 131.7%, and 122.6% improvements over the shared task baseline for Bribri, Guaran\'i, and Orizaba Nahuatl captioning, respectively, in our dev set evaluation and maintain >150% improvements for the Bribri and Orizaba Nahuatl languages in the test set evaluation. We find retrieval is highly language-dependent, beneficial only for large, in-domain corpora, and that synthetic data augmentation accounts for around 28 chrF++ of the dev set Guaran\'i performance gain. Our submission is the overall winner of the shared task, placing second out of five finalist submissions in human evaluations of target-language captions.
@article{arxiv.2605.20626,
title = {Retrieval-Augmented Long-Context Translation for Cultural Image Captioning: Gators submission for AmericasNLP 2026 shared task},
author = {Aashish Dhawan and Christopher Driggers-Ellis and Dzmitry Kasinets and Daisy Zhe Wang and Christan Grant},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.20626},
year = {2026}
}