Improving Similar Language Translation With Transfer Learning

We investigate transfer learning based on pretrained neural machine translation models to translate between (low-resource) similar languages. This work is part of our contribution to the WMT 2021 Similar Languages Translation Shared Task where we submitted models for different language pairs, including French-Bambara, Spanish-Catalan, and Spanish-Portuguese in both directions. Our models for Catalan-Spanish (82 .79 BLEU) and Portuguese-Spanish (87 .11 BLEU) rank top 1 in the official shared task evaluation, and we are the only team to submit models for the French-Bambara pairs.