TICO-19: the Translation Initiative for Covid-19

TL;DR

TICO-19 is a collaborative initiative providing multilingual COVID-19 translation data and resources to support AI and machine translation development, especially for under-resourced languages crucial for vulnerable populations.

Contribution

It offers a large, multilingual dataset and translation memories for 35 languages, including many under-resourced, to advance COVID-19 information access through AI and MT tools.

Findings

Data available for 35 languages, including 26 low-resource languages.

Translation memories created for all language pairs.

Facilitates development and testing of translation tools for COVID-19 information.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst pandemic to strike the world in over a century. Crucial to stemming the tide of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is communicating to vulnerable populations the means by which they can protect themselves. To this end, the collaborators forming the Translation Initiative for COvid-19 (TICO-19) have made test and development data available to AI and MT researchers in 35 different languages in order to foster the development of tools and resources for improving access to information about COVID-19 in these languages. In addition to 9 high-resourced, "pivot" languages, the team is targeting 26 lesser resourced languages, in particular languages of Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia, whose populations may be the most vulnerable to the spread of the virus. The same data is translated into all of the languages represented, meaning that testing or development can be done for any pairing of languages in the set. Further, the team is converting the test and development data into translation memories (TMXs) that can be used by localizers from and to any of the languages.