# FFR v1.1: Fon-French Neural Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09217/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [Survey of Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00486/) (2021)
- [Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03983/) (2022)
- [Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12654/) (2022)
- [JWSign: A Highly Multilingual Corpus of Bible Translations for more Diversity in Sign Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10174/) (2023)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [OkwuGb'e: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07762/) (2021)
- [SMOL: Professionally translated parallel data for 115 under-represented languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12301/) (2025)
- [Bilex Rx: Lexical Data Augmentation for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15265/) (2023)
- [English2Gbe: A multilingual machine translation model for {Fon/Ewe}Gbe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11482/) (2021)
- [AfriVEC: Word Embedding Models for African Languages. Case Study of Fon and Nobiin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05132/) (2021)
- [FFSTC: Fongbe to French Speech Translation Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05488/) (2024)
- [FonMTL: Towards Multitask Learning for the Fon Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14280/) (2023)
- [Towards Open-Ended Discovery for Low-Resource NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01220/) (2025)
- [Ngambay-French Neural Machine Translation (sba-Fr)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13497/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

All over the world and especially in Africa, researchers are putting efforts into building Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to help tackle the language barriers in Africa, a continent of over 2000 different languages. However, the low-resourceness, diacritical, and tonal complexities of African languages are major issues being faced. The FFR project is a major step towards creating a robust translation model from Fon, a very low-resource and tonal language, to French, for research and public use. In this paper, we introduce FFR Dataset, a corpus of Fon-to-French translations, describe the diacritical encoding process, and introduce our FFR v1.1 model, trained on the dataset. The dataset and model are made publicly available at https://github.com/ bonaventuredossou/ffr-v1, to promote collaboration and reproducibility.