UDS--DFKI Submission to the WMT2019 Similar Language Translation Shared Task

Abstract: In this paper we present the UDS-DFKI system submitted to the Similar Language Translation shared task at WMT 2019. The first edition of this shared task featured data from three pairs of similar languages: Czech and Polish, Hindi and Nepali, and Portuguese and Spanish. Participants could choose to participate in any of these three tracks and submit system outputs in any translation direction. We report the results obtained by our system in translating from Czech to Polish and comment on the impact of out-of-domain test data in the performance of our system. UDS-DFKI achieved competitive performance ranking second among ten teams in Czech to Polish translation.