  The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst pandemic to strike the world in over a
century. Crucial to stemming the tide of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is communicating
to vulnerable populations the means by which they can protect themselves. To
this end, the collaborators forming the Translation Initiative for COvid-19
(TICO-19) have made test and development data available to AI and MT
researchers in 35 different languages in order to foster the development of
tools and resources for improving access to information about COVID-19 in these
languages. In addition to 9 high-resourced, "pivot" languages, the team is
targeting 26 lesser resourced languages, in particular languages of Africa,
South Asia and South-East Asia, whose populations may be the most vulnerable to
the spread of the virus. The same data is translated into all of the languages
represented, meaning that testing or development can be done for any pairing of
languages in the set. Further, the team is converting the test and development
data into translation memories (TMXs) that can be used by localizers from and
to any of the languages.
