@inproceedings{imamura-etal-2023-pivot,
    title = "Pivot Translation for Zero-resource Language Pairs Based on a Multilingual Pretrained Model",
    author = "Imamura, Kenji  and
      Utiyama, Masao  and
      Sumita, Eiichiro",
    editor = "Utiyama, Masao  and
      Wang, Rui",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XIX, Vol. 1: Research Track",
    month = sep,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Macau SAR, China",
    publisher = "Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2023.mtsummit-research.29/",
    pages = "348--359",
    abstract = "A multilingual translation model enables a single model to handle multiple languages. However, the translation qualities of unlearned language pairs (i.e., zero-shot translation qualities) are still poor. By contrast, pivot translation translates source texts into target ones via a pivot language such as English, thus enabling machine translation without parallel texts between the source and target languages. In this paper, we perform pivot translation using a multilingual model and compare it with direct translation. We improve the translation quality without using parallel texts of direct translation by fine-tuning the model with machine-translated pseudo-translations. We also discuss what type of parallel texts are suitable for effectively improving the translation quality in multilingual pivot translation."
}