Fon to French
“Oun yìn wàn nouwé” means “I love you” in Fon, an African language spoken by approximately two million people across Benin, Nigeria and Togo. Aiming to translate texts from his mother, Bonaventure Dossou worked with Chris Emezue to scrape data from a Jehovah Witness Bible and create a basic Fon to French machine translation model. Since the language is “mostly spoken and rarely documented,” this is a low-resource neural machine translation problem, which presents a number of additional challenges. (See also Sennrich and Zhang (2019), by my former NLP/NMT professor in Edinburgh.)