@inproceedings{ahmadi-etal-2025-literary,
    title = "Literary Translations and Synthetic Data for Machine Translation of Low-resourced {M}iddle {E}astern Languages",
    author = "Ahmadi, Sina  and
      Hameed, Razhan  and
      Sennrich, Rico",
    editor = "Salesky, Elizabeth  and
      Federico, Marcello  and
      Anastasopoulos, Antonis",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2025)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria (in-person and online)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.iwslt-1.10/",
    pages = "110--118",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-272-5",
    abstract = "Middle Eastern languages represent a linguistically diverse landscape, yet few have received substantial attention in language and speech technology outside those with official status. Machine translation, a cornerstone application in computational linguistics, remains particularly underexplored for these predominantly non-standardized, spoken varieties. This paper proposes data alignment and augmentation techniques that leverage monolingual corpora and large language models to create high-quality parallel corpora for low-resource Middle Eastern languages. Through systematic fine-tuning of a pretrained machine translation model in a multilingual framework, our results demonstrate that corpus quality consistently outperforms quantity as a determinant of translation accuracy. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that strategic data selection significantly enhances cross-lingual transfer in multilingual translation systems. These findings offer valuable insights for developing machine translation solutions in linguistically diverse, resource-constrained environments."
}