# Enhancing Translation for Indigenous Languages: Experiments with Multilingual Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [How to Fine-Tune BERT for Text Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05583/) (2019)
- [Pre-Trained Models: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07139/) (2021)
- [Multilingual Translation with Extensible Multilingual Pretraining and Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00401/) (2020)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02201/) (2016)
- [The Tatoeba Translation Challenge -- Realistic Data Sets for Low Resource and Multilingual MT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06354/) (2020)
- [Survey of Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00486/) (2021)
- [AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08726/) (2021)
- [Towards the Next 1000 Languages in Multilingual Machine Translation: Exploring the Synergy Between Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03110/) (2022)
- [Lesan -- Machine Translation for Low Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08191/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [NLP Progress in Indigenous Latin American Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05365/) (2024)
- [Improving Indigenous Language Machine Translation with Synthetic Data and Language-Specific Preprocessing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03135/) (2026)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Long-Context Translation for Cultural Image Captioning: Gators submission for AmericasNLP 2026 shared task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20626/) (2026)
- [Misgendering and Assuming Gender in Machine Translation when Working with Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13165/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes CIC NLP's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descriptions for three methods. We used two multilingual models, namely M2M-100 and mBART50, and one bilingual (one-to-one) -- Helsinki NLP Spanish-English translation model, and experimented with different transfer learning setups. We experimented with 11 languages from America and report the setups we used as well as the results we achieved. Overall, the mBART setup was able to improve upon the baseline for three out of the eleven languages.