  We develop machine translation and speech synthesis systems to complement the
efforts of revitalizing Judeo-Spanish, the exiled language of Sephardic Jews,
which survived for centuries, but now faces the threat of extinction in the
digital age. Building on resources created by the Sephardic community of Turkey
and elsewhere, we create corpora and tools that would help preserve this
language for future generations. For machine translation, we first develop a
Spanish to Judeo-Spanish rule-based machine translation system, in order to
generate large volumes of synthetic parallel data in the relevant language
pairs: Turkish, English and Spanish. Then, we train baseline neural machine
translation engines using this synthetic data and authentic parallel data
created from translations by the Sephardic community. For text-to-speech
synthesis, we present a 3.5 hour single speaker speech corpus for building a
neural speech synthesis engine. Resources, model weights and online inference
engines are shared publicly.

Computation and Language