  In this work, we present an extensive study of statistical machine
translation involving languages of the Indian subcontinent. These languages are
related by genetic and contact relationships. We describe the similarities
between Indic languages arising from these relationships. We explore how
lexical and orthographic similarity among these languages can be utilized to
improve translation quality between Indic languages when limited parallel
corpora is available. We also explore how the structural correspondence between
Indic languages can be utilized to re-use linguistic resources for English to
Indic language translation. Our observations span 90 language pairs from 9
Indic languages and English. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
large-scale study specifically devoted to utilizing language relatedness to
improve translation between related languages.
