Pivot strategies as an alternative for statistical machine translation tasks involving iberian languages

This paper describes different pivot approaches to built SMT systems for language pairs with scarce parallel resources. The strategy is particularly interesting for Spain, a country with three official languages (Catalan, Basque, and Galician) besides Spanish, where it is difficult to find parallel corpora between two of the first three mentioned languages but it is relatively easy to collect it between Spanish and any of them. This characteristic, however, allow us to develop machine translation systems from major languages like English, to Catalan for instance, using Spanish as pivot. Such systems help these minority languages giving them global presence and promoting their use in content collaboration. We describe a English-Catalan baseline system built following the synthetic approach, we compare it with the transfer approach and comment about future enhancement that could be implemented for this language pair.