  Despite the reported success of unsupervised machine translation (MT), the
field has yet to examine the conditions under which these methods succeed, and
where they fail. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of unsupervised
MT using dissimilar language pairs, dissimilar domains, diverse datasets, and
authentic low-resource languages. We find that performance rapidly deteriorates
when source and target corpora are from different domains, and that random word
embedding initialization can dramatically affect downstream translation
performance. We additionally find that unsupervised MT performance declines
when source and target languages use different scripts, and observe very poor
performance on authentic low-resource language pairs. We advocate for extensive
empirical evaluation of unsupervised MT systems to highlight failure points and
encourage continued research on the most promising paradigms.

Computation and Language