In this paper, we introduce a sentence-level comparable text corpus crawled and created for the less-resourced language pair, Manipuri(mni) and English (eng). Our monolingual corpora comprise 1.88 million Manipuri sentences and 1.45 million English sentences, and our parallel corpus comprises 124,975 Manipuri-English sentence pairs. These data were crawled and collected over a year from August 2020 to March 2021 from a local newspaper website called ‘The Sangai Express.’ The resources reported in this paper are made available to help the low-resourced languages community for MT/NLP tasks.

Standard neural machine translation (NMT) allows a model to perform translation between a pair of languages. Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT), on the other hand, allows a model to perform translation between several language pairs, even between language pairs for which no sentences pair has been seen during training (zero-shot translation). This paper presents experiments with zero-shot translation on low resource Indian languages with a very small amount of data for each language pair. We first report results on balanced data over all considered language pairs. We then expand our experiments for additional three rounds by increasing the training data with 2,000 sentence pairs in each round for some of the language pairs. We obtain an increase in translation accuracy with its balanced data settings score multiplied by 7 for Manipuri to Hindi during Round-III of zero-shot translation.