  We investigate transfer learning based on pre-trained neural machine
translation models to translate between (low-resource) similar languages. This
work is part of our contribution to the WMT 2021 Similar Languages Translation
Shared Task where we submitted models for different language pairs, including
French-Bambara, Spanish-Catalan, and Spanish-Portuguese in both directions. Our
models for Catalan-Spanish ($82.79$ BLEU) and Portuguese-Spanish ($87.11$ BLEU)
rank top 1 in the official shared task evaluation, and we are the only team to
submit models for the French-Bambara pairs.
