# Towards Neural No-Resource Language Translation: A Comparative Evaluation of Approaches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20584 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20584/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02201/) (2016)
- [Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06259/) (2023)
- [Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00440/) (2017)
- [LLM-Assisted Rule Based Machine Translation for Low/No-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08997/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Komi-Yazva--Russian Parallel Corpus and Evaluation Protocol for Zero- and Few-Shot LLM Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06420/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

No-resource languages - those with minimal or no digital representation - pose unique challenges for machine translation (MT). Unlike low-resource languages, which rely on limited but existent corpora, no-resource languages often have fewer than 100 sentences available for training. This work explores the problem of no-resource translation through three distinct workflows: fine-tuning of translation-specific models, in-context learning with large language models (LLMs) using chain-of-reasoning prompting, and direct prompting without reasoning. Using Owens Valley Paiute as a case study, we demonstrate that no-resource translation demands fundamentally different approaches from low-resource scenarios, as traditional approaches to machine translation, such as those that work for low-resource languages, fail. Empirical results reveal that, although traditional approaches fail, the in-context learning capabilities of general-purpose large language models enable no-resource language translation that outperforms low-resource translation approaches and rivals human translations (BLEU 0.45-0.6); specifically, chain-of-reasoning prompting outperforms other methods for larger corpora, while direct prompting exhibits advantages in smaller datasets. As these approaches are language-agnostic, they have potential to be generalized to translation tasks from a wide variety of no-resource languages without expert input. These findings establish no-resource translation as a distinct paradigm requiring innovative solutions, providing practical and theoretical insights for language preservation.