Rethinking Low-Resource MT: The Surprising Effectiveness of Fine-Tuned Multilingual Models in the LLM Age

This study challenges the current paradigm shift in machine translation, where large language models (LLMs) are gaining prominence over traditional neural machine translation models, with a focus on English-to-Faroese translation. We compare the performance of various models, including fine-tuned multilingual models, LLMs (GPT-SW3, Llama 3.1), and closed-source models (Claude 3.5, GPT-4). Our findings show that a fine-tuned NLLB model outperforms most LLMs, including some larger models, in both automatic and human evaluations. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of using LLM-generated synthetic data for fine-tuning. While closed-source models like Claude 3.5 perform best overall, the competitive performance of smaller, fine-tuned models suggests a more nuanced approach to low-resource machine translation. Our results highlight the potential of specialized multilingual models and the importance of language-specific knowledge. We discuss implications for resource allocation in low-resource settings and suggest future directions for improving low-resource machine translation, including targeted data creation and more comprehensive evaluation methodologies.