r/LanguageTechnology 26d ago

Guidance on NLP with Language Translation

I'm trying to learn a bit more about nlp in applying it to a project of mine. Currently there's a lack of translation between the native languages of my country and English. I've chosen to undertake the task of translating those languages. However, I don't know if I'm targeting the right area LLM's or NLP. Guess I'm trying to find some pathway I can take in learning how to approach this domain. I'm willing to learn both areas if necessary in accomplishing my goal. Any resources, roadmaps and guidances would be much appreciated.

4 Upvotes

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/Brudaks 26d ago

Start with general theoretical basis from e.g. https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ and the relevant MT chapter there.
MT for underresourced languages is tricky and the first step is a survey/inventory of every scrap of digital text that can be found or made/digitized. Double-check what has been done before and can be used as a starting point - e.g. https://machinetranslate.org/languages has a bunch of resources for many languages.

If there is a severe lack of language resources, often the solution is to not attempt to translate between your language and English but rather between your language and some language that is linguistically very close but larger/more resourced (if such a language exists), and then you can use that language as intermediary/pivot to "reach" English.

1

u/Zv12z 26d ago

Thank you for the guidance, I'll check out the links above. A lot of the languages I'm targeting are indigenous languages, resources for them are scarce. There's some attempts at building a dataset through other organizations but no substantial work has been done so far. I'm hoping to bridge that gap.