Paper ID: 2405.13350

Efficacy of ByT5 in Multilingual Translation of Biblical Texts for Underrepresented Languages

Corinne Aars, Lauren Adams, Xiaokan Tian, Zhaoyu Wang, Colton Wismer, Jason Wu, Pablo Rivas, Korn Sooksatra, Matthew Fendt

This study presents the development and evaluation of a ByT5-based multilingual translation model tailored for translating the Bible into underrepresented languages. Utilizing the comprehensive Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus, we trained the model to capture the intricate nuances of character-based and morphologically rich languages. Our results, measured by the BLEU score and supplemented with sample translations, suggest the model can improve accessibility to sacred texts. It effectively handles the distinctive biblical lexicon and structure, thus bridging the linguistic divide. The study also discusses the model's limitations and suggests pathways for future enhancements, focusing on expanding access to sacred literature across linguistic boundaries.

Submitted: May 22, 2024