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

TL;DR

This paper develops and evaluates a ByT5-based multilingual translation model specifically designed for translating the Bible into underrepresented languages, demonstrating its potential to improve access to sacred texts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ByT5-based model tailored for biblical translation into low-resource languages, leveraging character-based encoding and a specialized corpus.

Findings

Model achieves improved BLEU scores on biblical translations

Handles complex biblical lexicon and structure effectively

Identifies limitations and future directions for model enhancement

Abstract

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.