The paper describes the 3 NMT models submitted by the eTranslation team to the WMT 2021 news translation shared task. We developed systems in language pairs that are actively used in the European Commission’s eTranslation service. In the WMT news task, recent years have seen a steady increase in the need for computational resources to train deep and complex architectures to produce competitive systems. We took a different approach and explored alternative strategies focusing on data selection and filtering to improve the performance of baseline systems. In the domain constrained task for the French–German language pair our approach resulted in the best system by a significant margin in BLEU. For the other two systems (English–German and English-Czech) we tried to build competitive models using standard best practices.

The paper describes the submissions of the eTranslation team to the WMT 2020 news translation shared task. Leveraging the experience from the team’s participation last year we developed systems for 5 language pairs with various strategies. Compared to last year, for some language pairs we dedicated a lot more resources to training, and tried to follow standard best practices to build competitive systems which can achieve good results in the rankings. By using deep and complex architectures we sacrificed direct re-usability of our systems in production environments but evaluation showed that this approach could result in better models that significantly outperform baseline architectures. We submitted two systems to the zero shot robustness task. These submissions are described briefly in this paper as well.