We propose a new paradigm for machine translation that is particularly useful for no-resource languages (those without any publicly available bilingual or monolingual corpora): LLM-RBMT (LLM-Assisted Rule Based Machine Translation). Using the LLM-RBMT paradigm, we design the first language education/revitalization-oriented machine translator for Owens Valley Paiute (OVP), a critically endangered Indigenous American language for which there is virtually no publicly available data. We present a detailed evaluation of the translator’s components: a rule-based sentence builder, an OVP to English translator, and an English to OVP translator. We also discuss the potential of the paradigm, its limitations, and the many avenues for future research that it opens up.

This work introduces additions to the corpus ChoCo, a multimodal corpus for the American indigenous language Choctaw. Using texts from the corpus, we develop new computational resources by using two off-the-shelf tools: word2vec and Linguistica. Our work illustrates how these tools can be successfully implemented with a small corpus.