Sang, Kyle RuiRabbani, TahseenZhou, TianyiTudor, Crina MadalinaDebess, Iben NyholmBruton, MicaellaScalvini, BarbaraIlinykh, NikolaiHoldt, Špela Arhar2025-02-142025-02-142025-03https://hdl.handle.net/10062/107131In this work, we reframe multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) as a federated meta-learning problem and introduce a translation dataset for the low-resource Kirundi language. We aggregate machine translation models () locally trained on varying (but related) source languages to produce a global meta-model that encodes abstract representations of key semantic structures relevant to the parent languages. We then use the Reptile algorithm and Optuna fine-tuning to fit the global model onto a target language. The target language may live outside the subset of parent languages (such as closely-related dialects or sibling languages), which is particularly useful for languages with limitedly available sentence pairs. We first develop a novel dataset of Kirundi-English sentence pairs curated from Biblical translation. We then demonstrate that a federated learning approach can produce a tiny 4.8M Kirundi translation model and a stronger NLLB-600M model which performs well on both our Biblical corpus and the FLORES-200 Kirundi corpus.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Article