Community-driven machine translation for the C atalan language at Softcatalà (2024)

Abstract: Among the services provided by Softcatalà, a non-profit 25-year-old grassroots organization that localizes software into Catalan and develops software to ease the generation of Catalan content, one of the most used is its machine translation (MT) service, which provides both rule-based MT and neural MT between Catalan and twelve other languages. Development occurs in a community-supported, transparent way by using free/open-source software and open language resources. This paper briefly describes the MT services at Softcatalà: the offered functionalities, the data, and the software used to provide them.

## introduction softcatalà foot_0 is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of catalan in the realm of computing, internet, and new technologies. this organization leverages a volunteer workforce composed of computer specialists, philologists, translators, students, and others. these volunteers contribute to the translation of software interfaces and documentation into catalan, while also developing tools that facilitate the creation and use of catalanlanguage content. in addition to a long history of providing catalan-localized versions of popular software, softcatalà offers a number of web-based documentation and language-related services, such as a grammar and spelling checker for catalan, a video and audio transcription service, or machine translation (mt) systems. the service is mainly adsupported, free to use, and very popular in the catalan language community. foot_1 this paper describes softcatalà's mt service: the functionalities offered, the data, and the software used to provide them. ## the service softcatalà's mt service foot_2 provides mt between catalan and aragonese, occitan (both aranese and languedocian), french, english, italian and spanish using the free/open-source rule-based mt platform apertium, and between catalan and dutch, english, french, galician, german, italian, japanese, portuguese, and romanian using neural mt. most of our users are students, teachers, and public workers. ## evaluation in as can be seen in nllb model. note that google regularly updates their mt models; the results shown are about one year old (for details, see https://github.com/ softcatala/nmt-models). we plan to publish additional metrics in the next training round. ## concluding remarks the community-driven effort of softcatalà, a grassroots organization devoted to digitally enable the catalan language, has managed to provide the community with competitive, freely-available, open machine translation systems that anyone can use or even improve using free/open-source software.