Bolgov Maxim
2026
Script Correction and Synthetic Pivoting: Adapting Tencent HY-MT for Low-Resource Turkic Translation
Bolgov Maxim
Proceedings for the Ninth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT 2026)
Bolgov Maxim
Proceedings for the Ninth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT 2026)
This paper describes a submission to the LoResMT 2026 Shared Task for the Russian-Kazakh, Russian-Bashkir, and English-Chuvash tracks. The primary approach involves parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) of the Tencent HY-MT1.5-7B multilingual model. For the Russian-Kazakh and Russian-Bashkir pairs, LoRA adaptation was employed to correct the model’s default Arabic script output to Cyrillic. For the extremely low-resource English-Chuvash pair, two strategies were compared: mixed training on authentic English-Chuvash and Russian-Chuvash data versus training exclusively on a synthetic English-Chuvash corpus created via pivoting through Russian. Baseline systems included NLLB 1.3B (distilled) for Russian-Kazakh and Russian-Bashkir, and Gemma 2 3B for English-Chuvash. Results demonstrate that adapting a strong multilingual backbone with LoRA yields significant improvements over baselines while successfully addressing script mismatch challenges. Code for training and inference is released at: https://github.com/defdet/low-resource-langs-mt-adapt