Investigating backtranslation for the improvement of English-Irish machine translation

In this paper, we discuss the difficulties of building reliable machine translation systems for the English-Irish (EN-GA) language pair. In the context of limited datasets, we report on assessing the use of backtranslation as a method for creating artificial EN-GA data to increase training data for use state-of-the-art data-driven translation systems. We compare our results to earlier work on EN-GA machine translation by Dowling et al (2016, 2017, 2018) showing that while our own systems do not compare in quality with respect to traditionally reported BLEU metrics, we provide a linguistic analysis to suggest that future work with domain specific data may prove more successful.