# Acquisition of Translation Lexicons for Historically Unwritten Languages via Bridging Loanwords

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to create translation lexicons for unwritten languages by leveraging loanwords and expert knowledge, enabling translation in resource-scarce, code-switched environments.

## Contribution

It presents a novel approach to induce translation lexicons for unwritten languages using loanwords and minimal resources, especially in informal communication contexts.

## Key findings

- Lexicon induction is effective for Moroccan Darija-English translation.
- The method benefits human-assisted and statistical machine translation.
- Loanword bridging enables resource-scarce language translation.

## Abstract

With the advent of informal electronic communications such as social media, colloquial languages that were historically unwritten are being written for the first time in heavily code-switched environments. We present a method for inducing portions of translation lexicons through the use of expert knowledge in these settings where there are approximately zero resources available other than a language informant, potentially not even large amounts of monolingual data. We investigate inducing a Moroccan Darija-English translation lexicon via French loanwords bridging into English and find that a useful lexicon is induced for human-assisted translation and statistical machine translation.