In this paper, we describe the process of creating the FLORES+ datasets for several Romance languages spoken in Spain, namely Aragonese, Aranese, Asturian, and Valencian. The Aragonese and Aranese datasets are entirely new additions to the FLORES+ multilingual benchmark. An initial version of the Asturian dataset was already available in FLORES+, and our work focused on a thorough revision. Similarly, FLORES+ included a Catalan dataset, which we adapted to the Valencian variety spoken in the Valencian Community. The development of the Aragonese, Aranese, and revised Asturian FLORES+ datasets was undertaken as part of a WMT24 shared task on translation into low-resource languages of Spain.

The main goal of this project is to explore the techniques for training NMT systems applied to Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese. These languages belong to the same Romance family, but they are very different in terms of the linguistic resources available. Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese can be considered low resource languages. These characteristics make this setting an excellent place to explore training techniques for low-resource languages: transfer learning and multilingual systems, among others. The first months of the project have been dedicated to the compilation of monolingual and parallel corpora for Asturian, Aragonese and Aranese.