Charles Translator: A Machine Translation System between Ukrainian and Czech
This addresses the urgent need for translation services to support individuals affected by the Russian-Ukrainian war, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new language pair.
The authors tackled the lack of a high-quality machine translation system between Ukrainian and Czech by developing Charles Translator, a direct translation system that leverages typological similarity and block back-translation, resulting in an online web interface and Android app with speech input and script transliteration.
We present Charles Translator, a machine translation system between Ukrainian and Czech, developed as part of a society-wide effort to mitigate the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on individuals and society. The system was developed in the spring of 2022 with the help of many language data providers in order to quickly meet the demand for such a service, which was not available at the time in the required quality. The translator was later implemented as an online web interface and as an Android app with speech input, both featuring Cyrillic-Latin script transliteration. The system translates directly, compared to other available systems that use English as a pivot, and thus take advantage of the typological similarity of the two languages. It uses the block back-translation method, which allows for efficient use of monolingual training data. The paper describes the development process, including data collection and implementation, evaluation, mentions several use cases, and outlines possibilities for the further development of the system for educational purposes.