Charles Translator: A Machine Translation System between Ukrainian and Czech

TL;DR

Charles Translator is a specialized machine translation system enabling direct Ukrainian-Czech translation, developed rapidly during the 2022 conflict to support societal needs with innovative use of monolingual data and transliteration features.

Contribution

The paper introduces a direct Ukrainian-Czech translation system utilizing block back-translation and transliteration, addressing a gap in language technology during a critical period.

Findings

System effectively translates Ukrainian and Czech directly.

Utilizes block back-translation for efficient monolingual data use.

Features include web and Android interfaces with speech and transliteration.

Abstract

We present Charles Translator, a machine translation system between Ukrainian and Czech, developed as part of a society-wide effort to mitigate the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on individuals and society. The system was developed in the spring of 2022 with the help of many language data providers in order to quickly meet the demand for such a service, which was not available at the time in the required quality. The translator was later implemented as an online web interface and as an Android app with speech input, both featuring Cyrillic-Latin script transliteration. The system translates directly, compared to other available systems that use English as a pivot, and thus take advantage of the typological similarity of the two languages. It uses the block back-translation method, which allows for efficient use of monolingual training data. The paper describes the development process, including data collection and implementation, evaluation, mentions several use cases, and outlines possibilities for the further development of the system for educational purposes.