TIM-UNIGE Translation into Low-Resource Languages of Spain for WMT24

AbstractWe present the results of our constrained submission to the WMT 2024 shared task, which focuses on translating from Spanish into two low-resource languages of Spain: Aranese (spa-arn) and Aragonese (spa-arg). Our system integrates real and synthetic data generated by large language models (e.g., BLOOMZ) and rule-based Apertium translation systems. Built upon the pre-trained NLLB system, our translation model utilizes a multistage approach, progressively refining the initial model through the sequential use of different datasets, starting with large-scale synthetic or crawled data and advancing to smaller, high-quality parallel corpora. This approach resulted in BLEU scores of 30.1 for Spanish to Aranese and 61.9 for Spanish to Aragonese.