Abstract: 

The University of Innsbruck and the Ladin cultural institute "Micurá de Rü" are collaborating on a project dedicated to exploring the possibilities of machine translation of the (low-resource) Ladin language. Even in the contemporary era of ChatGPT, machine translation of smaller languages remains a challenging task. Despite the impressive progress of neural data-driven approaches and their establishment as state-of-the-art technology, their application to smaller languages is associated with significant difficulties. Traditionally, data-driven approaches require large training datasets to enable a successful generalisation and produce high-quality translations. However, the limited availability of resources and texts in these languages prevents their effective application. The advances of the last few years and the increased focus on low-resource machine translation have led to the development of various methods that circumvent the problem of limited data availability or make more efficient use of the available data. This talk discusses the applicability of these methods to the Ladin language and provides insights into the progress and results achieved so far in this research project.