# Towards a general purpose machine translation system for Sranantongo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.06383 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06383/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [Joey NMT: A Minimalist NMT Toolkit for Novices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12484/) (2019)
- [What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00437/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19567/) (2023)
- [Limitations of Religious Data and the Importance of the Target Domain: Towards Machine Translation for Guinea-Bissau Creole](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02674/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine translation for Sranantongo (Sranan, srn), a low-resource Creole language spoken predominantly in Surinam, is virgin territory. In this study we create a general purpose machine translation system for srn. In order to facilitate this research, we introduce the SRNcorpus, a collection of parallel Dutch (nl) to srn and monolingual srn data. We experiment with a wide range of proven machine translation methods. Our results demonstrate a strong baseline machine translation system for srn.