Italian-Chinese Neural Machine Translation: results and lessons learnt

Today, access to the Internet provides access to various forms of knowledge like free online lecture series offered by prestigious universities, massive open online courses, films and books, and Wikipedia. In addition, it is possible to join online communities on any topic of interest, get to know people with common interests, exchange thoughts and participate in debates. To enable access to these unprecedented knowledge bases, it is crucial to be able to translate texts into any language known by users. For this reason, Machine Translation has been a very active research field for the last thirty years. In this paper, we investigate the task of Chinese-Italian translations by exploiting Neural Machine Translation approaches. We trained several deep neural networks starting from two already available datasets containing Chinese-Italian parallel corpora. Then, we compared their performance against some of the most common machine translation services freely available online. In particular, we take advantage of Microsoft Translator, Google Translate, DeepL, and ModernMT.